MCLC: Guangzhou party secretary investigated

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Guangzhou party secretary investigated
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Source: NYT (6/27/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/world/asia/chinas-anticorruption-campaign
-moves-to-a-powerful-party-seat.html

China’s Anticorruption Campaign Unseats a Powerful Party Chief in Guangzhou
By CHRIS BUCKLEYJUNE 27, 2014

HONG KONG — The Communist Party chief of Guangzhou, one of China’s most
populous and wealthiest cities, has been held for investigation by the
party’s anticorruption agency, state-run media announced on Friday, one
day after he admonished city officials to embrace President Xi Jinping’s
campaign against lax discipline.

The abrupt downfall of the official, Wan Qingliang, stood out from some
other recent prominent investigations over graft allegations because Mr.
Wan still held a position of considerable power, and was not in the
twilight of his career. He was the most powerful functionary of Guangzhou,
a sprawling city of some 13 million long-term residents that is the
capital of Guangdong Province, a pillar of manufacturing and exports in
southern China.

Mr. Wan was the mayor of Guangzhou, long known as Canton in English, from
2010 to 2011, when he became the city’s party secretary, a more powerful
post in China, where party rank is all-important. Mr. Wan also sat on
Guangdong’s Standing Committee, the party body that steers the province
and its 106 million people.
Photo

As is almost always the case when such inquiries are first announced, the
party’s anticorruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline
Inspection, issued a single-sentence statement
<http://www.ccdi.gov.cn/xwtt/201406/t20140627_24615.html> about Mr. Wan’s
downfall.

“Wan Qingliang is suspected of grave violations of discipline and the law,
and is now under investigation by the organization,” the commission said
on its website. It gave no details of his alleged misdeeds.

In China, party investigations into corruption usually precede any legal
inquiry, so party leaders decide whether to subject a fallen official to
criminal trial and punishment.

But there is little likelihood that, having been publicly accused of such
abuses, Mr. Wan can escape the usual course of such investigations: a
party report finding him culpable, followed by a police inquiry,
indictment, trial and a prison sentence.

Vows to stamp out corruption have long been part of Chinese leaders’
rhetoric, but Mr. Xi, who is also the Communist Party general secretary,
has appeared determined to root out the worst abuses, which have fanned
deep public anger with officials. He has vowed to take down both “flies
and tigers” — junior and high-ranked officials who take bribes, steal
assets and illicitly enrich themselves and their families.

Politics in Guangdong Province have long been complicated by its distance
from Beijing and its distinctive Cantonese language and mores, which have
made it more difficult for Mandarin-speaking officials sent from northern
China to fit in. The result has been unusually complex and capricious
factional maneuvering.

Mr. Wan, 50, was born in Guangdong and rose through the province’s party
apparatus, taking posts in several smaller cities there before being
appointed mayor of Guangzhou and then city party secretary. In early 2011,
he won media attention in China when he said he was too frugal to buy a
house <http://gz.house.163.com/11/0107/13/6PQ3SOFR00873C6D.html>.

Unlike Beijing and Shanghai, Guangzhou does not answer directly to central
leaders in Beijing; it first answers to Guangdong Province. But it is
often grouped with those two cities as among China’s most economically and
politically powerful metropolitan areas.

Several other Guangdong officials have also been placed under
investigation over accusations of corruption since last year, including
Cao Jianliao, a former vice mayor of Guangzhou
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-china-corruption-idUSBRE9BJ05
V20131220>.

A day before Mr. Wan’s downfall, he oversaw one of the party rituals that
Mr. Xi has revived: a meeting to immerse cadres in a “mass line” campaign
intended to instill traditional communist virtues and root out the sources
of corruption and ideological laxity.

Party committee secretaries, Mr. Wan said, should set an example of
“writing out materials comparing and examining themselves,” theGuangzhou
Daily reported on Friday
<http://gzdaily.dayoo.com/html/2014-06/27/content_2672809.htm>.

Kiki Zhao contributed research from Beijing.