MCLC: naked official chooses early retirement

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: naked official choose early retirement
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Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (5/21/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/under-pressure-naked-officia
l-chooses-early-retirement/

Under Pressure, ‘Naked Official’ Chooses Early Retirement
By AMY QIN 

The directive on “naked officials” came down in February in an internal
document from the Communist Party’s Central Organization Department:
“Bring back your family, or retire early.”

Faced with this ultimatum, Fang Xuan, deputy party chief of the southern
city of Guangzhou, chose early retirement.

Mr. Fang’s departure occurred without fanfare. As of Monday, his name was
no longer listed on Guangzhou’s official website. The announcement of his
successor, the Foshan party chief Li Yiwei, was released to the news media
on the same day without further elaboration, according to a report
<http://china.caixin.com/2014-05-19/100679038.html?cx_from=news.baidu.com>
by Caixin magazine.

But the details of Mr. Fang’s forced retirement, revealed by Caixin citing
internal sources, offer a glimpse into how China is dealing with its
longstanding problem of “naked officials” — those who have packed off
their family and, often, ill-gotten wealth abroad.

Such officials are a well-established phenomenon in China, one that has
long dogged top-level efforts to stem capital flight and corruption.
According to a 2011 estimate by the People’s Bank of China, as many as
18,000 officials fled the country between the mid-1990s and 2008, taking
with them more than 800 billion renminbi, or about $130 billion, in stolen
assets. Some academics have estimated
<http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/27/uk-hongkong-china-investment-idUK
BREA0Q04R20140127> that in the past five years, more than a million
Chinese officials and their family members have moved assets abroad.

Efforts to curb the practice have been stepped up in recent months as part
of President Xi Jinping’s larger anticorruption drive. In January, the
party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspectionissued rules barring
such officials from promotion.

In an interview with China Daily in March, the head of China’s Supreme
People’s Procuratorate, Cao Jianming, said that prosecutors would
intensify efforts to rein in the phenomenon, starting by tightening
supervision of officials still in China and working more closely with
overseas authorities to hunt down those who had already fled abroad.

In the same month, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily ran an editorial
calling for the “corruption funnel” to be blocked. Beijing Youth Daily, in
an editorial 
<http://epaper.ynet.com/html/2014-05/08/content_56975.htm?div=-1> this
month, welcomed news that Switzerland had pledged to disclose information
on foreign accounts in its famously secretive banks — the “holy land” for
Chinese officials’ assets abroad, the newspaper said — as a boon in the
fight against officials sending ill-gotten gains abroad.

That fight has focused particular attention in recent months on Guangdong,
the coastal province where Mr. Fang served. After a central Discipline
Inspection team deployed to Guangdongreported
<http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2014/0226/c1001-24473489.html> that the
number of “naked officials” in “certain areas” of the province constituted
a major problem, Hu Chunhua, the Guangdong party chief, vowed
<http://china.huanqiu.com/article/2014-03/4881299.html> at the National
People’s Congress meeting in March to crack down on the problem in
accordance with central party guidelines.

It was amid the intensified anticorruption drive, said Caixin, that Mr.
Fang chose to retire.

It was probably not a difficult decision, however. As Caixin noted, Mr.
Fang would have stepped down in any case by October, when he turns 60,
officialdom’s mandatory retirement age for men.