The End of Authority by Douglas E. Schoen

Author:Douglas E. Schoen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Insiderism

In China, where dissidence is harshly punished and loyalty to the Communist Party remains generally high, political corruption has bred cynicism. In the Beishi district of Baoding in October 2011, a drunk driver ran into two female university students, killing one. When guards stopped the driver, Li Qiming, all he told them was “My father is Li Gang”—the deputy police chief of the district. Li was free to go, but his story spread rapidly around China, triggering anger and protests. There were contests on the Internet for people to incorporate the phrase “My father is Li Gang” into Chinese poetry. Today, people throughout China use the phrase “My father is Li Gang” as an excuse to shirk responsibility.

In late 2011, a leaked government document exposed extraordinary corruption in China. Beijing had identified 225 corrupt officials, 58 of them at the high political level and above, who had embezzled more than $392 million. The document named 1,640 corrupt officials in Guangdong Province—170 of them high-level cadres—who had stolen more than $18 billion. According to Bao Tong, a former director of the Chinese Communist Party’s Office of Political Reform, one-party rule makes stamping out corruption impossible. “Everyone helps each other out,” he said. “If you are in trouble, I’ll help you out, and if I’m in trouble you help me out.” He added, “If I were in the current system, I’d be corrupt too.”[12] Indeed, Bao’s twisted version of a golden rule has become far too commonplace in China and elsewhere.

So much so, in fact, that even Communist Party head Xi Jinping, in his first speech to the Politburo, warned that pervasive corruption could “doom the party and the state.”[13] Xi clearly was responding to the concerns of ordinary Chinese, who have cited corruption—including patronage and nepotism—as one of their biggest concerns. That these concerns could penetrate the often-insular party leadership shows how real and pervasive they are.

Xi’s comments indicated his awareness of how corruption has motivated political protest movements elsewhere: “In recent years,” he said, “the long-pent-up problems in some countries have led to the venting of public outrage, to social turmoil and to the fall of governments, and corruption and graft have been an important reason. A mass of facts tells us that if corruption becomes increasingly serious, it will inevitably doom the party and the state. We must be vigilant. In recent years, there have been cases of grave violations of disciplinary rules and laws within the party that have been extremely malign in nature and utterly destructive politically, shocking people to the core.”[14]

Though Xi did not mention them by name, surely two of the scandals in people’s minds involved Bo Xilai—the party official facing criminal trial for his wife’s involvement in the murder of a British business associate—and Prime Minister Wen Jiabo. A Bloomberg news story reported that Bo’s family held hundreds of millions of dollars in investments and other assets, while the New York Times reported that Wen’s family was worth at least $2.7 billion.[15] When Xi

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