MCLC: CCP bureaucrats' luxury cars

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: CCP bureaucrats' luxury cars
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Source: LA Times (1/8/12):
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-corruption-on-whe
els-20120108,0,4555295.story

China Communist Party bureaucrats like their cars high endA remnant of a
decades-old Communist Party perks system, the luxe wheels are a
conspicuous target of growing public outrage over the privileges of the
elite. Angry Chinese have started posting photos.
By Barbara Demick

Reporting from Beijing‹
Even the police are driving Porsches.

Chinese officials love their cars ‹ big, fancy, expensive cars. A
chocolate-colored Bentley worth $560,000 is cruising the streets of
Beijing with license plates indicating it is registered to Zhongnanhai,
the Communist Party headquarters. The armed police, who handle riots and
crowd control, have the same model of Bentley in blue.

And just in case it needs to go racing off to war, the Chinese army has a
black Maserati that sells in China
<http://www.latimes.com/topic/intl/china/guangzhou-%28china%29-PLGEO1001006
02011290.topic> for $330,000.

"Corruption on wheels is an accurate description of this problem," said
Wang Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing,
who has been advocating restrictions on officials' cars for years.

A remnant of a decades-old party perks system, the luxe wheels are a
conspicuous target of growing public outrage over the privileges of the
elite.

Armed with cellphone cameras, angry Chinese have started posting
photographs of the expensive government cars ‹ identifiable by their
license plates ‹ on a microblog site called Anti-Official Cars
Extravagance that was set up in August. (Government censors shut down an
earlier version of the same site.)

The Chinese government doesn't release figures, but automobile industry
analysts here say that spending for cars tops $15 billion annually, while
some scholars believe the figure is many times that amount.

Even at more conservative estimates, the figure is greater than that
allocated for low-income housing or for scientific research and
development.

Not to speak of the funding for school buses.

Anger over fancy government cars has been piqued by a spate of tragic
accidents in recent months involving overloaded school buses. In the worst
of them, 21 kindergartners were killed in Gansu province in November in a
van that was designed for nine passengers but was carrying 62 children.

"Every time I see a school bus accident and think about the great many
government Audi A6s on the street, I shake my head and sigh," one
microblogger who uses the name Minxingdie wrote after the accident.

The Audi A6 is the semiofficial car of the Chinese Communist Party; the
German automaker's parent, Volkswagen, was an early entry in the 1980s
into the Chinese market. According to industry analysts, there are more
than 100,000 A6s in China, about 20% of them owned by the government. Each
car costs $50,000 to $100,000, depending on engine size.

For the cops, luxury SUVs are all the rage. In the southern city of
Guangzhou, police were photographed driving a Mercedes-Benz SUV, while
those in the northeastern province of Jilin have another deluxe SUV, the
Porsche Cayenne.

"No wonder there's no money left for school buses!" remarked one
contributor to the car-outrage website. The commentators were particularly
scathing about the expensive cars with military plates. "Why does the
military need sports cars? Will it help them run faster when there's a
war?"

Photographs also showed cars with government, police and military plates
clearly being used on personal business: dropping off children at school,
at a shopping mall, on a family vacation.

"You can't get evidence about other kinds of corruption, such as people
accepting envelopes of cash, but this you easily see for yourself,"
explained the Guangzhou-based activist who started the website in response
to emailed questions. He did not wish to be identified.

The high spending on cars, said Ren Jianmin, a professor at Beijing's
Tsinghua University, is the result of a system set up by the Communist
Party in the 1940s to allocate perks to ranking members.

"The system dictates that once an official reaches a certain level, he
must be equipped with certain things, such as cars and, in the past,
houses," Ren said. "This system led to a huge number of government cars. "

Although in theory a government car is for official business, most
bureaucrats treat the car as their own to do with as they wish.
Regulations that limit the use of the car to working hours are widely
disregarded.