MCLC: Wenzhou rail disaster essay

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kevin lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: Wenzhou rail disaster essay
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker (10/22/12):
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/22/121022fa_fact_osnos#ixzz2A0ZA
iviD

LETTER FROM CHINA
BOSS RAIL
The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom.
BY EVAN OSNOS

On the morning of July 23, 2011, passengers hurried across Beijing
South Station at the final call to board bullet train D301, heading
south on the world’s largest, fastest, and newest high-speed railway,
the Harmony Express. It was bound for Fuzhou, fourteen hundred miles
away.

Beijing South Station is shaped like a flying saucer, its silvery
vaulted ceiling illuminated by skylights. It contains as much steel as
the Empire State Building and can handle two hundred and forty million
people a year, thirty per cent more than New York’s Penn Station, the
busiest stop in America. When Beijing South opened, in 2008, it was
the largest station in Asia; then Shanghai stole the crown. In all,
some three hundred new stations have been built or revitalized by
China’s Railway Ministry, which has nearly as many employees as the
civilian workforce of the United States government.

When the passengers for D301 reached the platform, they encountered a
vehicle that looked less like a train than a wingless jet: a tube of
aluminum alloy, a quarter of a mile from end to end, containing
sixteen carriages, painted in high-gloss white with blue racing
stripes. The guests were ushered aboard by female attendants in Pan
Am-style pillbox hats and pencil skirts; each attendant, according to
regulations, had to be at least five feet five inches tall, and was
trained to smile with exactly eight teeth visible. A twenty-year-old
college student named Zhu Ping took her seat, then texted her roommate
that she was about to “fly” home on the rails. “Even my laptop is
running faster than usual,” she wrote.

For the Cao family, in the sleeper section, riding in style was a mark
of achievement. The parents had immigrated to Queens, New York, two
decades earlier and worked their way up to stable jobs as custodians
at LaGuardia Airport. They put two sons through college, became
American citizens, and now found themselves back in China on a tour,
posing for pictures in matching hats, standing ramrod straight beneath
Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square. Their next stop would be a reunion
with relatives in Fuzhou. This was the first vacation of their lives.
Their son, Henry, who ran a camera-supply business in Colorado, was
returning, for the first time, to a country that he had been raised to
remember as poor.

Until now, China’s trains had always been a symbol of backwardness.
More than a century ago, when the Empress Dowager was given a
miniature engine to bear her about the Imperial City, she found the
“fire cart” so insulting to the natural order that she banished it and
insisted that her carriage continue to be dragged by eunuchs. Chairman
Mao crisscrossed the countryside with tracks, partly for military use,
but travel for ordinary people remained a misery of delayed,
overcrowded trains nicknamed for the soot-stained color of the
carriages: “green skins” were the slowest, “red skins” scarcely
better. Even after Japan pioneered high-speed trains, in the
nineteen-fifties, and Europe followed suit, China lagged behind, with
what the state press bemoaned as two inches of track per person—“less
than the length of a cigarette.”

In 2003, China’s Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, took charge of
plans to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway—more
than could be found in the rest of the world combined. For anyone with
experience on Chinese trains, it was hard to picture. “Back in 1995,
if you had told me where China would be today, I would have thought
you were stark raving mad,” Richard Di Bona, a British transportation
consultant in Hong Kong, told me recently. With a total investment of
more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars, the undertaking was
to be the world’s most expensive public-works project since President
Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, in the nineteen-fifties. To
complete the first route by 2008, Minister Liu, whose ambition and
flamboyance earned him the nickname Great Leap Liu, drove his crews
and engineers to work in shifts around the clock, laying track,
revising blueprints, and boring tunnels. “To achieve a great leap,” he
liked to say, “a generation must be sacrificed.” (Some colleagues
called him Lunatic Liu.) The state news service lionized an engineer
named Xin Li, because he remained at his computer so long that he went
partly blind in his left eye. (“I will keep working even without one
eye,” he told a reporter.) When the first high-speed line débuted with
a test run in June, 2008, it was seventy-five per cent over budget and
relied heavily on German designs, but nobody dwelled on that during
the ceremony. Cadres wept. When another line made its maiden run, Liu
took a seat beside the conductor and said, “If anyone is going to die,
I will be the first.”

That autumn, to help ward off the global recession, Chinese leaders
more than doubled spending on high-speed rail and upped the target to
ten thousand miles of track by 2020, the equivalent of building
America’s first transcontinental route five times over. China prepared
to export its railway technology to Iran, Venezuela, and Turkey. It
charted a freight line through the mountains of Colombia that would
challenge the Panama Canal, and it signed on to build the “pilgrim
express,” carrying the faithful between Medina and Mecca. In January,
2011, President Obama cited China’s railway boom in his State of the
Union address as evidence that “our infrastructure used to be the
best, but our lead has slipped.” The next month, the governor of
Florida, Rick Scott, blocked construction of America’s first
high-speed train, by rejecting federal funds. Amtrak had unveiled a
plan to reach speeds comparable to China’s by 2040.

Train D301 sped south and east across emerald-green paddies toward the
coast. To Henry Cao, who was seated beside a window in the last
compartment of the second car, the train seemed to float, describing
long elegant turns and shuddering now and then with the whump of a
train going in the opposite direction. As the sun set, a summer storm
was gathering, and Henry watched lightning flicker across the clouds.
He stretched out on the fold-down bed in his carriage. At his feet,
his mother sat upright. She had short, wavy hair, and wore a
blue-and-white striped shirt. She’d lived nearly half her life in
America, but she retained the habits of a Chinese traveller, and she
carried more than ten thousand dollars in cash, as well as gifts of
jade jewelry, in a fanny pack. Her husband sat across from her, with
his iPhone. He captured a wobbly snapshot of the digital speedometer
at the end of the carriage; it showed the kilometre equivalent of 188
m.p.h.

Miles ahead, something unusual was happening. At 7:30 p.m., on the
outskirts of the city of Wenzhou, lightning struck a heavy metal box
beside the tracks. The box, the size of a washer-dryer, was part of a
signal system that lets drivers and dispatchers know where trains are.
Because tunnels block a radar signal, trains rely largely on
hard-wired equipment like the box beside the track, which helps
drivers and dispatchers talk to each other and controls a machinelike
traffic signal, giving the drivers basic commands to stop and go. When
lightning struck the box, it blew a fuse, which caused two
catastrophic problems: it cut off communication and froze the signal on
the color green.

At a nearby station, a technician picked up garbled signals from the
tracks and ordered repairmen into the storm to investigate; meanwhile,
he reported the problem to a dispatcher in Shanghai named Zhang Hua.
The train carrying the Cao family was still miles away, but D3115,
also bound for Fuzhou, with a thousand and seventy-two people aboard,
was ahead of D301. Zhang called D3115 to warn the driver that, because
of the faulty signal, his train might shut down automatically. In that
case, he should override and run it at a cautious speed until he
reached a normal section again. As predicted, the computer brought the
train to a halt, but when the driver tried to get it moving it
wouldn’t start, despite repeated attempts. He called Shanghai six
times in five minutes, but couldn’t get through. On his train, a
passenger uploaded to the Web a picture of the carriage in darkness
and asked, “What happened to this train after that crazy storm?? It’s
running slower than a snail now. . . . Hope nothing is going to
happen.”

Zhang the dispatcher was juggling ten trains by now. Hearing nothing
further from D3115, he may have figured that it had re-started and
moved on. The train carrying the Cao family was already half an hour
late, and at 8:24 p.m. Zhang cleared it to go ahead. Five minutes
later, the driver of the first train finally succeeded in re-starting
his engine and began to inch forward. When his train reached a normal
section of track, it suddenly appeared on screens across the system,
as if from nowhere, and a dispatcher saw what was about to happen. The
train behind it had a green light and was charging down the track. The
dispatcher alerted the driver: “D301, be careful! There’s a train in
your zone. D3115 is ahead of you! Be careful, will you? The
equipment—” The line cut off.

The driver of D301, Pan Yiheng, was a thirty-eight-year-old railway
man with a broad nose and wide-set eyes. In the final seconds, Pan
pulled a hand-operated emergency brake. His train was high atop a
slender viaduct across a flat valley, and immediately ahead of him was
train D3115, moving so slowly that it might as well have been a wall.

The collision impaled Pan on the brake handle, and it hurled Henry Cao
into the air. His body tensed for impact. None came. Instead, he was
falling—for how long he couldn’t tell. “I heard my mother’s voice
shouting,” he told me later. “And then everything went black.” His
carriage and two others peeled off the tracks, tumbling sixty-five
feet to a field below. A fourth car, filled with passengers and
spewing sparks, was left dangling vertically from the edge of the
viaduct. Henry awoke in a hospital, where doctors removed his spleen
and a kidney. He had shattered an ankle, broken his ribs, and suffered
a brain injury. When he was alert enough to understand, he learned
that his parents were dead. In the chaos of the rescue and recovery,
his mother’s ten thousand dollars had also disappeared.

The Wenzhou crash killed forty people and injured a hundred and
ninety-two. For reasons both practical and symbolic, the government
was desperate to get trains running again, and within twenty-four
hours it declared the line back in business. The Department of
Propaganda ordered editors to give the crash as little attention as
possible. “Do not question, do not elaborate,” it warned, on an
internal notice. When newspapers came out the next morning, China’s
first high-speed train wreck was not on the front page.

But, instead of moving on, the public wanted to know what had
happened, and why. This was not a bus plunging off a road in a
provincial outpost; it was dozens of men and women dying on one of the
nation’s proudest achievements—in a newly wired age, when passengers
had cell phones and witnesses and critics finally had the tools to
humiliate the propagandists.

People demanded to know why a two-year-old survivor was found in the
wreckage after rescuers had called off the search. A railway spokesman
said it was “a miracle.” Critics jeered, calling his explanation an
“insult to the intelligence of the Chinese people.” At one point, the
authorities dug a hole and buried part of the ruined train, saying
they needed firm ground for recovery efforts. When reporters accused
them of trying to thwart an investigation, a hapless spokesman
replied, “Whether or not you believe it, I believe it,” a phrase that
took flight on the Internet as an emblem of the government’s vanishing
credibility. (The train was exhumed. The spokesman was relieved of his
duties and was last seen working in Poland.)

Within days, the state-owned company that produced the signal box
apologized for mistakes in its design. But to many in China the focus
on a single broken part overlooked the likely role of a deeper problem
underlying China’s rise: a pervasive corruption and moral disregard
that had already led to milk tainted by chemicals reaching the market,
and shoddy bridges and highways built hastily in order to meet
political targets. A host on state television, Qiu Qiming, became the
unlikely voice of the moment when he broke away from his script to
ask, on the air, “Can we drink a glass of milk that is safe? Can we
stay in an apartment that will not fall apart? Can we travel roads in
our cities that will not collapse?”

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had no choice but to visit the crash site
and vow to investigate. “If corruption was found behind this, we must
handle it according to law, and we will not be lenient,” he said.
“Only in this way can we be fair to those who have died.” People
didn’t forget Wen’s pledge as the first deadline for the investigation
came and went, and they continued to demand a fuller accounting. At
last, in December, authorities released an unprecedented, detailed
report. It acknowledged “serious design flaws,” a “neglect of safety
management,” and problems in bidding and testing. It also blamed
fifty-four people in government and industry, beginning with Great
Leap Liu. The Minister’s name became a byword for “a broken system,”
as the muckraking magazine Caixin called the Railway Ministry, a
testament to the political reality that, as Caixin put it, “since
absolute power corrupts absolutely, the key to curbing graft is
limiting power.” When I spoke to an engineer who worked on the
railway’s construction, he told me, “I can’t pinpoint which step was
neglected or what didn’t get enough time, because the whole process
was compressed, from beginning to end.” He added, “There is an
expression in Chinese: when you take too great a leap, you can tear
your balls.”

Scandal, of one kind or another, has become the backbeat to China’s
rise. Never have the citizens of the People’s Republic learned so much
about the perks of those who run it. The combination of wealth,
technology, and epic indiscretion has pulled aside the curtain that
once protected Communist Party leaders from scrutiny.

That became clear in February, when a police chief fell out with his
Party patron, Bo Xilai, and fled to the American Consulate, with a
career’s worth of knowledge about murder and embezzlement at the
highest ranks of the Party. The police chief, Wang Lijun, received no
protection—he was tried as a defector and a taker of bribes—but his
tales could not be untold: Bo Xilai, a political titan once destined
for higher office, was expelled from the Party for taking “huge
bribes,” abusing his power, and “other crimes”; his wife was tried and
convicted of poisoning to death the family’s British fixer. Bo’s
downfall also laid bare the myth of the humble public servant. At a
time when his official salary was the equivalent of nineteen thousand
dollars a year, his extended family acquired businesses worth more
than a hundred million dollars, according to Bloomberg News. The Bo
saga gave rise to other rumors, about other Party bosses, and though
censors kept as much off the Web as they could, each new tale sounded
less startling, less the exception than the rule. In September,
overseas Chinese papers reported what Beijing gossips had been
whispering for months: the son of a close aide to China’s President,
accompanied in the predawn hours by two women in states of undress,
had totalled a black Ferrari on an expressway in the capital. For the
Party, as it prepared to anoint a new slate of leaders to run the
country for the next ten years, the timing was excruciating.

The Railroad Minister, Liu Zhijun, did not initially look like a prime
candidate for a dramatic public disgrace. Bo Xilai was a Beijing
Brahmin—the tall, camera-ready son of a Party boss. Liu was a farmer’s
son, small and thin, with bad eyesight and an overbite. He grew up in
the villages outside the city of Wuhan, and left school as a teen-ager
for a job walking the tracks with a hammer and a gauge. He had an
innate sense of the path to power. Good penmanship was a rare skill in
the provinces, and Liu perfected his hand, becoming a trusted letter
writer for bosses with limited education. He married into a
politically connected family and was a Party member by age twenty-one.
He was a tireless promoter of the railways and of himself, and he
ascended swiftly, heading provincial bureaus on his way to the seat of
power in Beijing. By 2003, as Railroad Minister, he commanded a
bureaucratic empire second in scale and independence only to the
military, with its own police force, courts, and judges and with
billions of dollars at his disposal. His ministry, a
state-within-a-state, was known in China as tie laoda: Boss Rail.

Liu kept his hair in an untidy black comb-over and wore a style of
square horn-rimmed spectacles so common among senior apparatchiks that
they are known as “leader glasses.” A colleague of Liu’s, a railway
staffer who worked closely with him, told me, “Ever since the
revolution, most Chinese officials look alike. They have the same
face, the same uniform, even the same personality. They work step by
step, and they are content to sit back and wait for promotions. But
Liu Zhijun was different.” If it was possible to invest a railway job
with glamour, he was determined to do so. He liked to convene meetings
after midnight and make ostentatious displays of his work habits. Even
as he approached the highest ranks of power, he never stopped
flattering his superiors. When President Hu Jintao was returning by
train to Beijing one summer, Liu hustled up the platform so
frantically to greet him that he nearly ran out of his loafers. “I
shouted to him, ‘Minister Liu, your shoes! Don’t fall!’ ” the staffer
recalled. “But he couldn’t be bothered. He just kept grinning and
running.”

Liu’s success benefitted his brother Liu Zhixiang, who joined the
ministry and soared up through the ranks. He was wisecracking and
volatile—the Joe Pesci character of the family. In January, 2005, he
was detained for questioning about embezzlement, bribe-taking, and
intentional harm regarding his role in arranging the killing of a
contractor who sought to expose him. By then, he was vice-chief of the
Wuhan railway bureau. (The victim was stabbed to death with a
switchblade in front of his wife. According to an official legal
journal, he had predicted in his will: “If I am killed, it will have
been at the hand of corrupt official Liu Zhixiang.”) The Minister’s
brother had arranged for himself such a healthy piece of ticket sales
that he accumulated the equivalent of fifty million dollars in cash,
real estate, jewelry, and art. When investigators caught him, he was
living among mountains of money so large and unruly that the bills had
begun to molder. (Storing cash is one of the most vexing challenges
confronting corrupt Chinese officials, because the largest bill in
circulation is a hundred-yuan note, worth about fifteen dollars.) He
was convicted and received a death sentence that was suspended and
later reduced to sixteen years. But, instead of serving his time in a
facility for serious offenders, he was transferred to a hospital where
he reportedly continued to conduct railway business by phone.

Back in Beijing, Minister Liu surrounded himself with loyal
associates. The capo di tutti capi was the chief deputy engineer Zhang
Shuguang, who once arrived at a railway conference in a fur coat and a
white scarf and liked to describe his approach to negotiations as a
“clasped fist.” For much of his career, he ran the passenger-car
division, which gave him control over colossal spending choices. “It
was all up to a nod of his head,” Zang Qiji, a retired member of the
Academy of Railway Sciences, told me. Zhang had little experience with
science, but he aspired to credibility and attempted to secure
membership in an élite academic society by having two professors write
a book in his name. (He fell short of membership by a single vote.)

Liu bet everything on high-speed railways. To preëmpt inflation in the
cost of land and labor and materials, he preached haste above all. “We
must seize the opportunity, build more railways, and build them fast,”
he told a conference in 2009. Liu’s ambitions and Chinese
authoritarianism were a volatile combination. The ministry was its own
regulator, virtually unsupervised, and the Minister and his aides had
no tolerance for dissenting voices. When professor Zhao Jian, of
Beijing Transportation University, publicly objected to the pace of
high-speed-rail construction, Liu summoned him and advised him to keep
quiet. Zhao refused to back down, and the university president called
him. “He told me not to continue to voice my opinions,” Zhao told me.
The professor resisted, but his concerns were ignored—until the crash.
“Then it was too late,” he said.

The obsession with speed was all-encompassing. The system was growing
so fast that almost everything a supplier produced found a buyer,
regardless of quality. According to investigators, the signal that
failed in the Wenzhou crash was developed over six months, beginning
in June, 2007, by the state-owned China Railway Signal and
Communication Corporation. The company had a staff of some thirteen
hundred engineers, but it was overwhelmed by demands on its time, and
crash investigators discovered that those in charge of the signal
performed only a “lax” inspection, which “failed to discover grave
flaws and major hidden dangers.” The office in charge was “chaotic,” a
place where “files went missing.” Nevertheless, the signal passed
inspection in 2008 and was installed across the country. When the
industry gave out awards for new technology that year, the signal took
first prize. But an engineer inside the company subsequently told me
that he was not surprised to discover that the job had been rushed.

There were other suspicious factors as well. In April, 2010, the
chairman of Japan Central Railway, Yoshiyuki Kasai, said that China
was building trains that drew heavily on Japanese designs. When
Kawasaki Heavy Industries threatened to sue the Chinese for passing
off its technology as their own, the Railway Ministry in Beijing
dismissed the complaint as evidence of “a fragile state of mind and a
lack of confidence.” Kasai also pointed out that China was operating
the trains at speeds twenty-five per cent faster than those permitted
in Japan. “Pushing it that close to the limit is something we would
absolutely never do,” he told the London Financial Times.

In the last days before the crash, the rush to build the railways
added a final, lethal factor to the mix. In June, the government had
staged the début of the most prominent line yet—Beijing to Shanghai—to
coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist
Party. A full year had been slashed from the construction schedule,
and the first weeks of the run were marred by delays and power
failures. According to a manager in the ministry, high-speed-rail
staff were warned that further delays would affect the size of their
bonuses. On the night of July 23, 2011, when trains began to stack up,
dispatchers and maintenance staff raced to repair the faulty signal
and ignored the simplest solution: stop the trains and regain the
signal. Wang Mengshu, a scholar in the Chinese Academy of Engineering
who was deputy chief of the committee investigating the crash, told
me, “The maintenance people weren’t familiar enough with their jobs,
and they didn’t want to stop the train. They didn’t dare.”

When the crash occurred, Great Leap Liu was no longer running the
Railway Ministry. In August, 2010, the National Audit Office reviewed
the books of a big state-owned company and came upon a
sixteen-million-dollar “commission” to an intermediary in return for
contracts on the high-speed rail. The intermediary turned out to be a
woman named Ding Shumiao, who, perhaps more than anyone else, embodied
the runaway riches created by China’s railway boom. Ding was an
illiterate egg farmer in rural Shanxi—five feet ten, with broad
shoulders and a foghorn of a voice. In the nineteen-eighties, after
Deng Xiaoping launched the country toward the free market, she
collected eggs from neighbors to sell in the county seat. That was
illegal without a permit. The eggs were confiscated, and years later
she still talked of her embarrassment. In time, she came to run a
small, thriving restaurant, where she gave away food to powerful
customers and exaggerated her own success. “If she has one yuan,
she’ll say she has ten,” one of Ding’s longtime colleagues told me.
“It makes her look more influential, and bit by bit people began to
think that they could benefit from their friendship with her.”

Ding’s restaurant became a favorite with coal bosses and officials,
and soon she was involved in coal trucking. Then she was “flipping
carriages,” as it’s known in the railway business: working her
connections to get cheap access to coveted freight routes and,
according to Wang, the investigator, reselling the rights “for ten
times what she paid.” She became friendly with Great Leap Liu around
2003, and, with her ties to the railway business, she prospered. Her
company, Broad Union, signed joint ventures and supplied the ministry
with train wheels, sound barriers, and more. In two years, Broad
Union’s assets grew tenfold, to the equivalent of six hundred and
eighty million dollars in 2010, according to China’s Xinhua news
service.

Ding’s given name, Shumiao, betrayed her rural roots, so she changed
it to Yuxin, at the suggestion of her feng-shui adviser. She was easy
to lampoon—Daft Mrs. Ding, people called her—but she had a genius for
cultivating business relationships. A longtime colleague told me,
“When I tried to teach her how to analyze the market, how to run the
company, she said, ‘I don’t need to understand this.’ ” Caixin
chronicled her audacious social ascent. To gain foreign contacts, she
backed a club “for international diplomats,” which managed to attract
a visit in 2010 by Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Her
lavish receptions drew members of the Politburo. She joined the lower
house of the provincial legislature, and made so many charitable gifts
that in 2010 she ranked No. 6 on the Forbes China list of
philanthropists.

Ding was detained in January, 2011, suspected of taking kickbacks
totalling sixty-seven million dollars, according to the Global Times.
(The ministry also accused her of working her connections to get Liu’s
brother transferred from jail to a hospital.)

Like many others, Ding knew something that government auditors
uncovered only later: China’s most famous public-works project was an
ecosystem almost perfectly hospitable to corruption—opaque,
unsupervised, and overflowing with cash, especially after the
government announced a stimulus to mitigate the effects of the 2008
global financial crisis. It boosted funding for railway projects to
more than a hundred billion dollars in 2010. In some cases, the
bidding period was truncated from five days to thirteen hours. In
others, the bids were mere theatre, because construction had already
begun. Cash was known to vanish: in one instance, seventy-eight
million dollars that had been set aside to compensate people whose
homes had been demolished to make way for railroad tracks disappeared.
Middlemen expected cuts of between one and six per cent. “If a project
is four and a half billion, the middleman is taking home two hundred
million,” Wang said. “And, of course, nobody says a word.”

One of the most common rackets was illegal subcontracting. A single
contract could be divvied up and sold for kickbacks, then sold again
and again, until it reached the bottom of a food chain of labor, where
the workers were cheap and unskilled. (The practice is hardly unique
to the railways: in 2010, a rookie welder employed by an illegal
subcontractor was working on a dormitory in Shanghai when he dropped
his torch and set the building on fire; fifty-eight people died.) In
November, 2011, a former cook with no engineering experience was found
to be building a high-speed railway bridge using a crew of unskilled
migrant laborers who substituted crushed stones for cement in the
foundation. In railway circles, the practice of substituting cheap
materials for real ones was common enough to rate its own expression:
touliang huanzhu—robbing the beams to put in the pillars.

With so many kickbacks changing hands, it isn’t surprising that parts
of the railway went wildly over budget. A station in Guangzhou slated
to be built for three hundred and sixteen million dollars ended up
costing seven times that. The ministry was so large that bureaucrats
would create fictional departments and run up expenses for them.
Procurement was a prime opportunity for graft. The ministry spent
nearly three million dollars on a five-minute promotional video that
went largely unseen. The video led investigators to the ministry’s
deputy propaganda chief, a woman whose home contained a million and a
half dollars in cash and the deeds to nine houses; her husband, who
also worked for the ministry, was found to have a collection of gift
cards—a discreet alternative to cash bribes. Other government agencies
also had serious financial problems—out of fifty, auditors found
problems with forty-nine—but the scale of plunder in the railway world
was in a class by itself. Liao Ran, an Asia specialist at Transparency
International, told the International Herald Tribune that China’s
high-speed railway was shaping up to be “the biggest single financial
scandal not just in China, but perhaps in the world.”

In most countries, the effects of kleptocracy are easy to predict:
economists have calculated that for every point that a nation’s
corruption rises on a scale of one to ten, its economic growth drops
by one per cent. (Think Haiti under François Duvalier or Zaire under
Mobutu.) But the exceptions are important. In Japan and Korea,
corruption accompanied the nation’s rise, not its collapse. There is
no more conspicuous case than the United States. When promoters of the
first transcontinental railroad were found to have secretly paid
themselves to build it—the 1872 scandal known as Credit Mobilier—the
scale of plunder was described by the press as “the most damaging
exhibition of official and private villainy and corruption ever laid
bare to the gaze of the world.” Between 1866 and 1873, the country put
down thirty-five thousand miles of track, minting enormous fortunes
but also, as Mark Twain put it, displaying “shameful corruption.”
(Twain’s novel “The Gilded Age,” written with Charles Dudley Warner,
gave the era its name.) The excesses of the railroad boom led to the
Panic of 1873 and subsequent financial crises, before political
pressure to curb abuses gained momentum during the Progressive Era.

In China, as in the United States, corruption and growth flourished
together. In the nineteen-eighties, a carton of Double Happiness
cigarettes was enough to secure a job transfer or the ration coupon
for a washing machine. But in 1992 China began to free up the
distribution of land and factories for private use, and the corruption
boom was under way. According to the sinologist Andrew Wedeman, in a
single year the average sum recovered in corruption cases more than
tripled, to six thousand dollars. Cartons of Double Happiness gave way
to Hermès bags, sports cars, and tuition for children studying abroad.
The larger the deal, the higher the cadre needed to approve it, and
bribes moved straight up the ranks.

A writer I know named Hu Gang, a small, meticulous man of fifty,
happened to be one of those doing the bribing. He was running an
auction house, a business in which a single signature from a judge
bestows the right to auction off buildings, land, and other assets and
collect a hefty commission. Everyone seemed to be in on the take, Hu
said. “So, I began to think, If they can do it, why can’t I?” Hu was a
natural; he bribed judges—first with cigarettes, then banquets, then
trips to massage parlors. He followed certain rules of his own: never
bribe a stranger; time cash gifts for the fall, when tuition bills
come around. Before long, he was juggling relationships with so many
judges that he had to make three trips to the massage parlor in a
single day. After five years, he had a nest egg worth a million and a
half dollars. Then he was picked up in a routine crackdown and served
a year in jail.

Officials and businessmen looked out for each other by organizing
themselves into “protective umbrellas,” a step in what Chinese
scholars have termed the “mafiazation” of the state. By 2007, the
China scholar Minxin Pei found that nearly half of all Chinese
provinces had sent their chief of transportation to jail for
corruption. It was costing China three per cent of its gross domestic
product; that would be two hundred billion dollars today—more than the
national budget for education. Since then, the opportunities to steal
have only diversified. This summer, the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the
national authority on language, added a new word: maiguan, “to buy a
government promotion.”

Today, the scale of temptation for members of China’s government is
unlike anything encountered in the West. According to Bloomberg News,
the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature gained
more wealth in one year—2011—than the combined net worth of the United
States President, his Cabinet, all the members of Congress, and the
Justices of the Supreme Court. Bloomberg went a step further, and
reported, in June, that the extended family of China’s incoming
President, Xi Jinping, has tens of millions of dollars in real-estate
and financial assets. The government has since blocked the Bloomberg
Web site.

There are two basic views of how corruption will affect China’s
future. The optimistic scenario is that it is part of the ambitious
transition from Socialism to a free market, with highways and trains
that inspire envy even in the developed world. In July, the U.S.
Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, told a reporter, “The Chinese
are more successful because in their country only three people make
the decision. In our country, three thousand people do.”

The other view holds that the compact between the people and their
leaders is fraying, that the ruling class is scrambling to get what it
can in the final years of frenzied growth, and that the Party will be
no more capable of reforming itself from within than the Soviets were.
Last year, the central bank accidentally posted an internal report
estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials have
fled the country, having stolen a hundred and twenty billion dollars—a
sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. The government has vowed
that officials will forgo luxury cigarettes and shark’s-fin soup, but
vigilant Chinese bloggers continue to post photographs of cadres
wearing luxury watches and police departments with Maseratis and
Porsches painted blue and white. Even Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister,
who will leave the Politburo next month, declared that corruption was
“the biggest danger facing the ruling party”—a threat that, left
unchecked, could “terminate the political regime.”

In February, 2011, five months before the train crash, the Party
finally moved on Liu Zhijun. According to Wang Mengshu, investigators
concluded that Liu was preparing to use his illegal gains to bribe his
way onto the Party Central Committee and, eventually, the Politburo.
“He told Ding Shumiao, ‘Set aside four hundred million for me. I’m
going to need to spread some money around,’ ” Wang told me. Four
hundred million yuan is about sixty-four million dollars. Liu actually
managed to pull out nearly thirteen million, Wang said. “The central
government was worried that if he really succeeded in giving out four
hundred million in bribes he would essentially have bought a
government position. That’s why he was arrested.”

Liu was expelled from the Party the following May, for “severe
violations of discipline” and “primary leadership responsibilities for
the serious corruption problem within the railway system.” An account
in the state press alleged that Liu took a four-per-cent kickback on
railway deals; another said he netted a hundred and fifty-two million
dollars in bribes. He was the highest-ranking official to be arrested
for corruption in five years. But it was Liu’s private life that
caught people by surprise. The ministry accused him of “sexual
misconduct,” and the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that he had
eighteen mistresses. His friend Ding was said to have helped him line
up actresses from a television show in which she invested. Chinese
officials are routinely discovered in multiple sins of the flesh,
prompting President Hu Jintao to give a speech a few years ago warning
comrades against the “many temptations of power, wealth, and beautiful
women.” But the image of a gallivanting Great Leap Liu, and the sheer
logistics of keeping eighteen mistresses, made him into a punch line.
When I asked Liu’s colleague if the mistress story was true, he
replied, “What is your definition of a mistress?”

By the time Liu was deposed, at least eight other senior officials had
been removed and placed under investigation, including Zhang, Liu’s
bombastic aide. Local media reported that Zhang, on an annual salary
of less than five thousand dollars, acquired a luxury home near Los
Angeles, stirring speculation that he had been preparing to join the
exodus of officials who take their fortunes abroad. (In recent years,
corrupt cadres who send their families overseas have become known in
Chinese as “naked officials.”)

In the months that I spent talking to people about the rise and fall
of Liu Zhijun, his story seemed to confound both his enemies and his
friends. His rivals acknowledged that, unlike many corrupt officials,
Liu had actually achieved something in office, and produced a railway
system that, if the problems can be repaired, will ultimately benefit
the nation. And his defenders found themselves awkwardly saying that
he was doing nothing that his peers were not. Liu’s colleague, an
affable former military man, told me that at a certain point
corruption became difficult for Liu to avoid: “Inside the system
today, if you don’t take bribes you have to get out. There’s no way
you can stay. If three of us are in one department, and you are the
only one who doesn’t take a bribe, are the two of us ever going to
feel safe?”

Not long ago, I met a subcontractor for the railway, and I asked if
things had been cleaned up since Liu’s downfall. He let out a
humorless laugh. “They made a show of it, but it’s still the same
rules,” he said. “They caught Ding Shumiao, but she’s just one person.
There are many, many Ding Shumiaos.” Li Xue, as I’ll call him, is
fifty-four, with a growl of a voice and a face weathered by life
outdoors, but he was funny and relaxed when we met, and I liked him
immediately. He’d spent his career blasting railroad
tunnels—assembling crews, punching holes through mountains, and then
moving on to the next job. He is a grandfather now, and proud of all
that the country has built in his lifetime: “America always criticizes
us for human rights,” he said. “It’s our weakness. But construction is
our strength. We put people together fast. The bosses don’t have to
listen to anybody but themselves.”

One weekend, Li invited me out to his latest job, in the rocky hills
of Hebei Province, a few hours’ drive from Beijing. Over lunch, he
talked wistfully about what he called a “golden age” a few years ago,
when costs were lower and officials didn’t know how much they could
earn on the side. “The bribes we pay now keep growing,” he said.
“We’re the ones who get squeezed.”

We got into his black Audi sedan and climbed a road up into the hills,
where we turned onto a rutted muddy track lined with cornfields and
brick farmhouses. I asked if he enjoyed the wining and dining that
comes with building tunnels. He shook his head. “It’s exhausting,” he
said, and explained the taxonomy of bribes. “There’s the head of the
department, and then the managers and the ones who run the warehouses.
You’ve got to take care of them just like praying to the Buddha—you
don’t pray, you run into trouble.” The hardest days were
groundbreakings, when everyone who showed up expected a cut. “It costs
us a fortune,” he said. Recently, he had turned over the entertainment
duties to a younger colleague. “He really excels at it,” he said.

We reached a plateau, with excavators and bulldozers, and parked
outside a tunnel into the hillside. Li introduced me to the explosives
chief, a thin man in his twenties, with a coxcomb of spiky hair. I
asked where he’d learned his trade. “Self-taught,” he said.

Li spat into the mud and handed me a hard hat. Inside, the tunnel was
cool and dark, about thirty feet high, with a smooth ceiling, faintly
lit by work lights along the edges. Li had dug ten tunnels in his
life, and this would be the longest—two miles end to end.

After a while, we reached a group of eight workers in cotton shoes,
hard hats, and military-surplus uniforms. They were wrestling a heavy
iron frame into a side door in the tunnel. They groaned and heaved and
slipped in the mud, in a scene illuminated by a single light bulb. It
could have been 1912, instead of 2012. Li said that ten days earlier
he had run into a problem: he hadn’t been paid by the subcontractor
overseeing the tunnel, and now he had to lay off workers and stop
digging. The Railway Ministry wasn’t as flush as it once was, and less
money was trickling down to him.

“I’m thinking of quitting,” he said. “It’s getting harder and harder
to make a profit. We get paid next to nothing, and now we can’t even
get paid. Why should I keep doing it?” We walked on, and I could see
my breath in the wan lights along the wall. Deep inside the tunnel, we
could no longer hear the clanging of the workers near the entrance. Li
seemed distracted. “The officials are getting greedier and greedier,”
he said. “In the past, whenever we were working on a tunnel, the local
officials visited the site. Now they just stay in their big, beautiful
office and collect their money.”

Over our heads, the finished ceiling gave out, and mud and darkness
lay ahead. For a second, all was silent, except for the sound of
rushing water somewhere up ahead. “We have to stop,” Li said. “It’s
dangerous past this point.”

Several weeks after the Wenzhou crash, the Railway Ministry announced
a series of steps in the name of safety: it recalled fifty-four bullet
trains, to test sensors that could cause trains to stop unnecessarily;
it halted construction of new lines; and it ordered trains to slow
down from a top speed of 217 m.p.h. to 186 m.p.h. But before long the
railway boom resumed, and the first anniversary of the Wenzhou crash
was tightly managed. The state press was ordered not to visit the
scene, and survivors were warned to keep their mouths shut. When one
of them, a man in his twenties named Deng Qian, tried to visit the
site that day, he was tailed by police, who videotaped his movements.
“Their message to me was clear: I am now their enemy, their threat,”
he told me. “I think they will keep an eye on us forever.”

Henry Cao was struggling. He had spent five months in a Chinese
hospital, recovering from broken bones, neurological damage, and the
loss of his kidney and spleen. He could stay awake for only a few
hours at a time, and he was easily confused. After returning to his
family in Colorado, he had to close his camera-supply business. “I
actually feel like I want to die,” he told me. “What’s the point of
living when everything you tried to work for . . .” The government
offered his family two hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars for
his parents’ deaths, and another eighty-five thousand for his own
injuries. In August, he and his brother Leo flew to China to retrieve
their parents’ bodies. They asked to have a memorial in the ancestral
village in Fujian, but the government forbade it; the parents were
buried in a cemetery on Long Island.

The Wenzhou collision and the downfall of Liu Zhijun have come to
symbolize some of the essential risks facing the Communist Party. The
crash struck at the middle-class men and women who have accepted the
grand bargain of modern Chinese politics in the era after Socialism:
allow the Party to reign unchallenged as long as it is reasonably
competent. The crash violated the deal, and, for many, it became what
Hurricane Katrina was to Americans: the iconic failure of government
performance. It is a merciless judgment. Gerald Ollivier, a senior
infrastructure specialist at the World Bank in Beijing, pointed out
that trains in China are still by far one of the safest means of
transportation. “If you think about it, the China high-speed railway
must be transporting at least four hundred million people per year,”
he said. “How many people have died on the China high-speed railway in
the past four years? Forty people. This is the number of people who
die in road accidents in China every five or six hours. So, in terms
of safety, this is by far one of the safest ways of transportation.
The accident this past year was certainly very tragic and should not
have happened. But, compared to the alternative of moving people by
car, it is safer by a factor of at least a hundred.” And yet, in
China, people are more inclined to quote a very different statistic:
in forty-seven years of service, high-speed trains in Japan have
recorded just one fatality—a passenger caught in a closing door.

China’s recent scandals seem to have hastened a moment of truth: the
new Politburo will take office next month knowing that the people are
not as content as before with what they have gained from the country’s
rise. Over a generation, the Party has raised five hundred million
citizens from poverty, and constructed a physical and economic world
previously inconceivable. Yet people see no shortage of reasons to
demand better: Beijing spends more today on domestic security,
protecting the state from a daily parade of public grievances and
unrest, than it does on foreign defense. Despite the efforts of the
censors, Chinese people can go online and read that their leaders eat
uncontaminated vegetables grown at remote, guarded farms, and breathe
air that has been scrubbed by filters. The fall of Bo Xilai and Great
Leap Liu dramatized the culture of entitlement run amok. For years,
Liu and Bo dedicated themselves to enhancing their own prospects along
with those of the nation. They lost their sense of proportion, and the
question is whether their government has, too.

Liu Zhijun will go on trial. The date is a state secret, but the
verdict is not. Ninety-eight per cent of Chinese trials end in
conviction, and yet the most reliable predictor of Liu’s fate is that
the Party has already embarked on one of its most enduring rituals.
Just as technicians once airbrushed political casualties out of the
archives and portraits, censors took to the Web last year to excise
years’ worth of glowing news reports and documentaries that hailed
Liu’s accomplishments, leaving behind only squibs about his arrest.
Great Leap Liu has been expunged so thoroughly from the history of
China’s achievements that you might never have known he existed. ♦