MCLC: Xi denounces corruption

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Xi denounces corruption
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/19/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/world/asia/new-communist-party-chief-in-c
hina-denounces-corruption.html

New Communist Party Chief in China Denounces Corruption in Speech
By EDWARD WONG 

BEIJING — In his first speech to the Chinese Communist Party’s elite
Politburo, Xi Jinping, the new party chief, denounced the prevalence of
corruption and said officials needed to guard against its spread or it
would “doom the party and the state.”

The blunt remarks by Mr. Xi were made Saturday at a meeting of the
25-person Politburo, which announced a turnover of 15 members last week
during the change in leadership at the close of the 18th Party Congress,
the state news media reported on Monday.

Mr. Xi’s admonitions suggested that he wanted to take a populist tack in
shaping his image, but they were also consistent with warnings that
Chinese leaders have delivered in recent years and echoed points he made
in his inaugural speech on Thursday. Corruption is one of the issues of
greatest concern to Chinese, and Mr. Xi even obliquely referred to the
problem in Arab countries and the revolutions there.

“In recent years, the long pent-up problems in some countries have led to
the venting of public outrage, to social turmoil and to the fall of
governments, and corruption and graft have been an important reason,” Mr.
Xi said, according to a version of the speech posted online. “A mass of
facts tells us that if corruption becomes increasingly serious, it will
inevitably doom the party and the state. We must be vigilant. In recent
years, there have been cases of grave violations of disciplinary rules and
laws within the party that have been extremely malign in nature and
utterly destructive politically, shocking people to the core.”

Mr. Xi used a Chinese aphorism — “worms come only after matter decays” —
to stress his point. The phrase is often attributed to Su Shi, a scholar
of the Northern Song dynasty, and it was cited on several recent occasions
by Bo Xilai, the disgraced former party chief of Chongqing, who was felled
last spring by a murder scandal and is expected to stand trial soon on
criminal charges related to abuse of power. When Mr. Bo used the phrase in
speeches, it was also in the context of denouncing corruption and
enhancing his populist image. Ironically, Mr. Xi’s allusion to recent
“grave violations” of party discipline appeared to refer in part to Mr. Bo.

Both Mr. Xi and Mr. Bo are sons of powerful Communist leaders, and Mr. Bo,
a former Politburo member, was seen as a rival to Mr. Xi.

Mr. Xi also took the occasion on Saturday to underscore the need to remain
true to the party’s founding ideology, and warned that some officials
appeared to be heading down a wayward path in this area, too.

“Faith in Marxism and a belief in socialism and communism is the political
soul of a Communist and the spiritual pillar that allows a Communist to
withstand any test,” Mr. Xi said. “To put it more vividly, ideals and
convictions are the spiritual calcium of Communists, and if these ideals
and convictions are missing or irresolute, then there is a lack of
spiritual calcium that leads to soft bones.”

A series of scandals and revelations this year have undermined confidence
in China’s leaders and cast greater scrutiny on the prevalence of nepotism
and patronage at the top ranks of the party. All that comes at a time when
influential voices are rising inside China calling for fundamental changes
to the political and economic systems.

The Bo Xilai scandal attracted widespread attention last spring inside
China and abroad. Then Bloomberg News reported
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-29/xi-jinping-millionaire-relations-
reveal-fortunes-of-elite.html> that the relatives of Mr. Xi held
investments and assets worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars, and
The New York Times published the results of a yearlong investigation that
found the family of Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, held investments and
assets worth at least $2.7 billion. The Web sites of both news
organizations were blocked in China around the time the articles were
published.

Pu Zhiqiang, a rights lawyer, said in an interview on Monday that “every
generation of leaders has mentioned” corruption upon taking office. “No
one would neglect paying attention to the problem of corruption,” he
added. “It’s common sense. The crux of the matter is how to implement
anti-corruption measures.”

On Thursday, the party announced that the new head of its anti-corruption
agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, would be Wang
Qishan, a former vice premier with deep experience in the finance sector.
Mr. Wang is now the sixth-ranking party official and is on the seven-man
Standing Committee of the Politburo.

(In other important appointments, the party announced Monday that Meng
Jianzhu, a Politburo member, will take charge of the party’s Central
Politics and Law Commission, which oversees security and the courts and
was previously run by a Standing Committee member, the much-disliked Zhou
Yongkang; and Zhao Leji, also on the Politburo, will be the head of the
Organization Department, which oversees personnel issues.)

There are those who say that relying on the anti-corruption commission and
a nontransparent process to ferret out and punish offending officials is
not the right way to set the party straight. At a seminar in Beijing on
Friday that was attended by liberal scholars and intellectuals, Chen
Youxi, a prominent lawyer and former official, emphasized that point.

“Our present approach to fighting corruption basically has increasingly
relied on turning the legal authorities into party authorities,
strengthening the Central Discipline Inspection Commission and using party
oversight against corruption,” he said. “But I think this is a dead end.
The more powerful the Discipline Inspection Commission has become, the
more serious corruption has become, because if you depend on secretively
fighting corruption, you only encourage more corruption.”
Patrick Zuo contributed research.