MCLC: Nanjing party chief removed from post

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MCLC LIST
Nanjing party chief removed from post
Source: NYT (1/8/15)
Chinese Official Is Removed From Post, and, Again, Salacious Details Flow
By AUSTIN RAMZY
Yang Weize, the former Communist Party secretary of Nanjing who is under investigation, at a running event in the city on Jan. 1. Credit Reuters
The announcement on Thursday that the Communist Party chief of the city of Nanjing had been removed from his post gave little explanation, save for a line about “serious discipline and law violations,” a phrase that generally refers to corruption.
While the report from the state-run news agency Xinhua on the dismissal of the Nanjing party chief, Yang Weize, provided little detail, other Chinese news outlets began to fill in the gaps. Some said that Mr. Yang was connected to Zhou Yongkang, the former head of China’s domestic security apparatus, who was arrested in December on charges of corruption and of leaking state secrets after months of investigation. Mr. Zhou’s ancestral village is in the nearby city of Wuxi, where Mr. Yang was previously party chief.
The most salacious item to emerge so far about Mr. Yang is that he “introduced TV anchors to Zhou Yongkang and slept with the anchors himself,” the state-run China Daily reported on Thursday, quoting the Hong Kong Commercial Daily. A woman who worked in the Wuxi government and who was said to be Mr. Yang’s mistress has also been detained, The Beijing News reported on Thursday.
Suggestions of sexual impropriety are common when Chinese officials are accused of corruption, but investigators rarely provide details. Last year, after Communist Party investigators explicitly used the word “adultery,” rather than a euphemism, in describing the actions of a fallen official, public questions forced investigators to give a rare explanation.
While a sexual relationship between a married person and someone other than the person’s spouse is not illegal in China, it is against party rules and “in violation of socialist morality,” the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said.
The party investigators did not explain, however, why such sordid particulars almost invariably follow the announcement of corruption cases. In a commentary on Thursday in The Beijing News, Hu Yinbin questioned the deluge of personal, but not always legally relevant, information. While acknowledging that corrupt officials should be scrutinized and criticized, Mr. Hu warned of the risk of “deviating from the themes of anticorruption and rule of law, and divert people’s focus from the positive changes the anticorruption movement and deepening reform bring to China’s economy.”
“The truth is,” he added, “fighting corruption shouldn’t be about angrily ‘beating a drowning dog,’ but should be about reflecting government efforts to build a mechanism to combat graft.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on January 8, 2015
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