MCLC: crash cover-up

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: crash cover-up
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (12/4/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/world/asia/how-crash-cover-up-altered-chi
nas-succession.html

How Crash Cover-Up Altered China’s Succession
By JONATHAN ANSFIELD

BEIJING — “Thank you. I’m well. Don’t worry,” read the post on a Chinese
social networking site. The brief comment, published in June, appeared to
come from Ling Gu, the 23-year-old son of a high-powered aide to China’s
president, and it helped quash reports that he had been killed in a
Ferrari crash after a night of partying.

It only later emerged that the message was a sham, posted by someone under
Mr. Ling’s alias — almost three months after his death.

The ploy was one of many in a tangled effort to suppress news of the crash
that killed Mr. Ling and critically injured two young female passengers,
one of whom later died. The outlines of the affair surfaced months ago,
but it is now becoming clearer that the crash and the botched cover-up had
more momentous consequences, altering the course of the Chinese Communist
Party’s once-in-a-decade leadership succession last month.

China’s departing president, Hu Jintao, entered the summer in an
apparently strong position after the disgrace of Bo Xilai, previously a
rising member of a rival political network who was brought down when his
wife was accused of murdering a British businessman. But Mr. Hu suffered a
debilitating reversal of his own when party elders — led by his
predecessor, Jiang Zemin — confronted him with allegations that Ling
Jihua, his closest protégé and political fixer, had engineered the
cover-up of his son’s death.

According to current and former officials, party elites, and others, the
exposure helped tip the balance of difficult negotiations, hastening Mr.
Hu’s decline; spurring the ascent of China’s new leader, Xi Jinping; and
playing into the hands of Mr. Jiang, whose associates dominate the new
seven-man leadership at the expense of candidates from Mr. Hu’s clique.

The case also shows how the profligate lifestyles of leaders’ relatives
and friends can weigh heavily in backstage power tussles, especially as
party skulduggery plays out under the intensifying glare of media.

Numerous party insiders provided information regarding the episode,
speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the
authorities. Officials have investigated the aftermath of the car wreck,
they say, including looking into accusations that a state oil company paid
hush money to the families of the two women.

Under Mr. Hu, Mr. Ling had directed the leadership’s administrative
center, the General Office, but was relegated to a less influential post
in September, ahead of schedule. Last month, he failed to advance to the
25-person Politburo and lost his seat on the influential party secretariat.

Mr. Hu, who stepped down as party chief, immediately yielded his post as
chairman of the military, meaning he will not retain power as Mr. Jiang
did. “Hu was weakened even before leaving office,” said a midranking
official in the Organization Department, the party’s personnel office.

Mr. Ling’s future remains unsettled, with party insiders saying that his
case presents an early test of whether Mr. Xi intends to follow through on
public promises to fight high-level corruption.

“He can decide whether to go after Ling Jihua or not,” said Wu Guoguang, a
former top-level party speechwriter, now a political scientist at the
University of Victoria in British Columbia. “Either way, this is a big
card in Xi Jinping’s hand.”
Mr. Ling, 56, built his career in the Communist Youth League. At an early
age, he secured the patronage of Mr. Hu, who led the Youth League in the
early 1980s and brought Mr. Ling to the General Office in 1995. “Hu didn’t
come with a lot of friends, but Ling was someone he knew he could trust,”
said the Organization Department official. “Officials said that if Ling
called, it was like Hu calling.”

Mr. Ling played a central role in moving Youth League veterans into high
offices and undermining Mr. Hu’s adversaries. Mr. Ling also wielded
leverage over Internet censorship of leaders’ affairs, and sought to use
it to benefit his patron.
“Negative publicity, including untruths, about Xi Jinping were not
suppressed the way publicity about Hu Jintao was,” said one associate of
party leaders.

As his influence grew, Mr. Ling tried to keep a low profile. About a
decade ago, his wife closed a software company she owned and formed a
nonprofit foundation that incubates young entrepreneurs. The couple sent
their son, Ling Gu, to an elite Beijing high school under an alias, Wang
Ziyun. “Ling Jihua told his family not to damage his career,” a former
Youth League colleague said. “But it seems it can’t be stopped.”

Still living under an alias, Ling Gu graduated from Peking University last
year with an international relations degree and began graduate studies in
education. One of his instructors said his performance plunged later in
his undergraduate years. “I think there were too many lures, too much
seduction,” he said.

Before dawn on March 18, a black Ferrari Spider speeding along Fourth Ring
Road in Beijing ricocheted off a wall, struck a railing and cracked in
two. Mr. Ling was killed instantly, and the two young Tibetan women with
him were hospitalized with severe injuries. One died months later, and the
other is recovering, party insiders said.

Under normal circumstances, party insiders said, suppressing such news to
protect the image of the party would be a routine matter. But Ling Jihua
went further, they said, maneuvering to hide his son’s death even from the
leadership.

The Beijing Evening News published an article and a photograph, but the
topic was immediately scoured from the Internet. Later, the families of
the two women in the car received payments from China’s largest state oil
company, according to a top executive with a major foreign multinational.
He said large sums had been paid “to make sure they shut up.” A publicity
executive for the company, China National Petroleum Corporation
<http://www.cnpc.com.cn/en/>, declined to answer questions about the
matter.

When overseas Chinese-language media reported in June that the Ferrari
driver had been Mr. Ling’s son, the Hong Kong-based magazine Yazhou
Zhoukan published a story debunking the reports, citing the message on the
social networking site. “The source for this was Ling Jihua’s office in
the General Office,” said a journalist close to the situation.

But the attempted cover-up spun out of Mr. Ling’s control.

Party insiders said that the police recorded the surname of the victim as
Jia, which sounds like the word for “fake,” a notation police officers
sometimes use when the truth is being obscured. The move set off rumors
connecting the dead driver to a recently retired party leader, Jia
Qinglin, who was infuriated and took his grievance to Mr. Jiang, the
former president.

The Central Guard Bureau, which manages leaders’ security, also was
mobilized to assist in the cover-up, the insiders said. That riled the
bureau’s former chief, an ally of Mr. Jiang, and the current chief, Cao
Qing, who already had qualms about Mr. Ling.
“They say that Ling was always calling up Cao Qing and telling him to do
this and do that,” said one woman from an official family. “Ling was
excessive and disrespectful.”

The issue came to a head in July as the leadership debated Mr. Bo’s fate
and hashed out plans for the leadership transition. “Just as they were
discussing the arrangements, the old comrades raised this,” said an
official from a central government media organization. “They said that
leaders have to obey party discipline, so this person was not qualified to
be promoted to the Politburo.”

In one exchange with Mr. Hu, Mr. Jiang also questioned Mr. Ling’s
“humanity” over accusations that he maintained his busy schedule and did
not properly observe his son’s death, several people said.

Mr. Hu felt compelled to sacrifice his ally, partly because the party was
also pursuing the case against Mr. Bo on disciplinary grounds. “Hu didn’t
want to give the others something they could use,” said a relative of a
former leader.
In a pivotal shake-up, Mr. Ling’s designated replacement, an old colleague
of Mr. Xi’s, arrived in July, six weeks before the reshuffle was
publicized.

By September, party insiders said, Mr. Hu was so strained by the Ling
affair and the leadership negotiations that he seemed resigned to yielding
power. As Mr. Hu’s influence faded, Mr. Xi began taking charge of military
affairs,  including a group coordinating China’s response to the
escalating row with Japan over disputed islands.

Ian Johnson and Edward Wong contributed reporting.