Excising the Cancer China's Communist Party knows that festering corruption within might kill it. But the patient can't treat itself, especially as the disease has infected crucial organs of the party, including the police and judiciary. Only outside specialists can prescribe the right medicine--but will party leaders allow them to break its monopoly on power? By Susan V. Lawrence in Beijing FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW August 20, 1998 I t was a scene that China's Communist Party dreads. On August 10, hundreds of angry citizens, many of them laid-off workers, demonstrated outside the red-walled compound in central Beijing where party leaders live and work. The protesters were investors in Xinguoda Futures, a firm affiliated to the People's Armed Police that had allegedly defrauded them of their savings. They had started by demanding their money back outside the firm's offices, but their wrath quickly turned against the party, taking the protest to the leadership compound--a reflex that shows how, to most Chinese, corruption begins and ends with their rulers. The perception stems from the party's control over all the structures of society--an unbridled power that enables party and government officials to amass fortunes and "become like mafia bosses," says populist writer Liang Xiaosheng in his recent book, An Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society. "People fear now for the future, for in China only the Communist Party can check this evolution into a criminalized society," he writes. And corruption is perceived to be getting worse. The cancer riddles the Communist Party, but--since the patient can't operate on itself--it can only be cured if the party submits itself to surgery by outsiders. The party knows that corruption could kill it. Party chief Jiang Zemin has for the past year repeatedly called the fight against corruption "a matter of life and death for the party and the state." But if the party has diagnosed its disease as terminal, the old medicine--occasional campaigns, exhortatory slogans, highly publicized executions--isn't working. China's citizens grow ever more sceptical as they suffer rising unemployment and slowing economic growth. In the search for a way to stem official corruption, a consensus appears to be emerging among China's planners and thinkers, some of them influential party advisers. They see a daring cure: fundamental political reform. Such reform would make the party accountable to outside institutions and groups, and limit the power of party officials. The question is whether Jiang is willing, or able, to push through such far-reaching reforms that would bring corruption under control. And even if he does, will he move fast enough, or go far enough, to satisfy public expectations? He also has to consider the potentially fatal side-effects: If he does open up the political system, he might win the party a new lease on life. But the political system could then be infected with a different disease--ever more assertive questioning of the party's leading role. Although the political-reform approach to combating corruption is being broached as never before, there remains opposition to it within the highest party echelons. According to a Chinese academic familiar with the debate, officials in the party's top corruptionfighting body, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission, cling to "traditional thinking"--code for resistance to political reform. Traditional thinking on countering corruption, however, doesn't seem to be getting them anywhere. "This is an urgent issue for them, but they can't find the effective means to deal with it," says the academic. The commission is soliciting the opinions of two lay people on anti-corruption strategies: Liang, the populist author, and He Qianglian, a Shenzhen academic. Liang's views appeal to anti-market-reform Marxists as he argues that economic reform has made corrupt petty officials wealthy, while ordinary people have benefited the least. He's writings call for getting the party apparatchiks out of the economy, and for more "morality and political responsibility" among officials. The commission isn't the only official body studying new ways to counter corruption. One centre of feverish theorizing on these matters is the strangely titled Communist Party Central Committee Translation Bureau. Originally an office for translating foreign ideological tracts, the bureau is now also a Central Committee think-tank. One of its researchers, political scientist He Zengke, is a leading thinker on corruption and an advocate of political reform to control it. What allows the cancer to grow, He argues, is the absence of nonparty mechanisms to check the power of party officials. The Communist Party's approach to fighting corruption has always been to police itself. China has no political opposition or independent anticorruption agencies. The news media are controlled by the party and civil society is weak. National and local people's congresses, the country's largely toothless legislatures, are meant to "supervise" central and local governments, He notes, but "they can't remove government leaders who abuse their power, without the consent of party leaders." Self-policing, says He, turns on a tenuous premise: "The success of anti-corruption efforts mainly depends on the political will and determination of top leaders," who must themselves be incorruptible. His prescription for a cure is simple: "If we really want to fight corruption, we must make the transition to democracy." By that, he means competitive elections at all levels of the party and government. Currently, such elections take place only in villages. He thinks it's time for elections to move up to the townships. He also believes China should open up its policymaking process. In Western countries, he notes, interest groups try to influence decision-making. In China, policy is made in secret, so interest groups exert their influence at the "output" end of the process, trying to affect implementation--often by bribing officials. "We should switch from influencing implementation to influencing policymaking," He says. These ideas may be too radical for some at the top levels of the party, but He is no voice in the wilderness. Respected sociologist Deng Weizhi and one of China's most famous economists, Wu Jinglian, both link corruption to political reform in a book, Governing China: Facing an Era of New Systemic Choices, released on August 3. "The roots of corruption," Deng says, "lie in the monopoly of power." In the same volume, however, Wang Huning, a political adviser to Jiang Zemin, warns that the political-reformist impulse should be directed towards "upholding and perfecting the party's leadership." Even as the debate rages, the party is moving forward tentatively to put modest limits on official power, notably in the economy. The reform of China's vast network of state-owned enterprises --most of which will be sold, merged, turned into joint stock-holding companies, or liquidated-- will cede to the market decisions now made by party officials. Jiang has also ordered the People's Liberation Army and the criminal-justice system to cease their business activities. Moreover, the leadership has told party members that they should be bound by the law, and submit to the "supervision" of the media. Such exhortations are less noble than they sound: Both the media and the criminal-justice system remain under the party's grip. The media receive instructions from party propaganda bureaus. The police and the courts take their orders from the party's political-legal committees. Nonetheless, Chinese, accustomed to reading political tea-leaves, see a shift in the leadership's thinking on the party's relationship with the law. They point to Jiang's substitution of one ideogram for another in his report to the party's 15th congress last September: Instead of "rule by law," Jiang said "rule of law"--meaning that the law should no longer be used to guarantee the party's supremacy; instead, the party should acknowledge the supremacy of the law. This is easier said than done. The party remains firmly in control of the legal system and law-enforcement agencies. Local party bosses, who appoint local police and approve their budgets, often meddle in police work and influence investigations. Murray Scot Tanner, an expert on China's criminal-justice system, points to national plans to professionalize the police force as a possible solution. Under the scheme, local police are to focus on crime prevention and community relations, while criminal cases will be handled by a nationwide network of professional investigators, trained in forensic science. But, says Tanner, a visiting professor at Beijing's Politics and Law University, "it's going slowly. It costs money and it's happening at a time of budget and staff cuts." The effects of the media's "supervision" of officialdom have been more immediately visible. Today, Chinese newspapers and television are full of detailed reports of official corruption. "Ten years ago, there was no reporting that exposed official wrongdoing," says Xiao Xiaolin, the host of Law and Society, a popular Chinese Central Television show watched by 100 million people. She says that many officials are now disciplined after CCTV exposes them. Xiao adds that she encounters "less and less" editorial interference from above. Like many journalists and scholars, she wants the party to pass a press law that would give legal backing to the media's supervisory role. In addition to the law and the media, a third weapon against corruption could be competition for official posts. Last year, Xiao took her camera crew into a government office in Hunan province to film more than a dozen candidates debating each other for a bureau chief's job. Applicants for the job, which had been publicly advertised, were assessed both by party officials and outside experts. Such transparency is a departure from the secrecy that previously attended party and government appointments. Party officials normally appoint bureaucrats of every stripe, opening the way to cronyism, nepotism and the outright sale of official posts. China's liveliest newspaper, Southern Weekend, which is owned by the Guangdong provincial party committee, on July 31 reported the case of a county grain-administration party boss in Anhui province who sold posts. The lucrative position of a grain station chief could be bought for 30,000 renminbi ($3,620) --lucrative because a crooked incumbent could line his pockets by buying grain at less than the state-mandated price, resell it at the full price and skim off the difference. In the past year, party leaders have thrown their full support behind village elections, which raises the hope that at least some local officials will be electorally accountable. Even former Premier Li Peng, a conservative who is now head of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, gave his nod to the experiment when he observed village elections in Jilin province last month. Li also commended transparency as the key to keeping local leaders accountable between elections. He urged them to open the village finances to public scrutiny. That principle should apply at all levels of government, says Fan Gang, who heads the National Economic Research Institute, a think-tank linked to the State Council's Economic System Reform Office. "We economists say that the first democracy should be public-finance democracy," says Fan. His institute is studying public-finance issues in 10 test sites around the country. Fan says local governments should be given the authority to raise local taxes. Currently, local governments can only supplement their budgets through easily abused fines and ad hoc fees. The party leadership appears ready to allow a modicum of transparency even at the highest levels. At the invitation of Luo Gan, China's top legal official, CCTV crews are filming selected internal sessions of the standing committee of the National People's Congress as it debates new laws. TV host Xiao quotes Luo as saying he wants to "bring the public into the law-making process." That footage will be edited for broadcast. But Xiao says CCTV may broadcast some of the sessions "live," starting this autumn. Progressive as these moves may be, the party's efforts to fight corruption are met with cynicism by most Chinese. Witness the public reaction to the recent sentencing of former Beijing party boss Chen Xitong to 16 years in prison: People were generally scornful of Chen's long-awaited punishment, which was supposed to demonstrate the party's commitment to excising corruption from even its highest ranks. Why the disdain? While Chen was still in office, the party blocked the media from reporting his excesses. After he fell, the party assigned itself the task of investigating his crimes. Only after three years did the party hand Chen over to the prosecutor's office, in February this year. Then, despite calls from law scholars for an open trial, the proceedings were held in secret, and lasted just one day. Many Chinese concluded that had Chen not fallen foul of his longtime political rival Jiang, he might never have been brought down. Corrupt party officials might well figure not that they should fear the law, but that they should nurture their relations with top party leaders--and that could be an invitation to more corruption. Although the debate on corruption runs far ahead of policy, party leaders nonetheless show signs of recognizing that the cure will only come with risky reform of China's political structures. Certainly Jiang Zemin appreciates the importance of being seen to fight corruption: The 1989 Tiananmen protests, which cost his predecessor his job, were as much about corruption as about democracy.