Paul French says that word is slowly getting out on just how much corruption goes on in China

If there’s one book this year that the world’s largest organisation – with 76 million members and counting – the Chinese Communist party, doesn’t want you to read then it is without doubt former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief Richard McGregor’s The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers. And they’re going to extraordinary lengths to stop you reading it.

Consider the computer I’m typing this column on right now in Shanghai. I’m firmly within the so-called Great Firewall of China. I can access an online bookseller overseas, I can type Richard McGregor into the search box and I can get the link to his book. Click on that link, though, and I get that little bit of English so familiar to Chinese internet users – Error 404.

Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to prevent me, or anyone else in China, from reading this book. That someone is, of course, the Chinese Communist party.

As far as I know – and publishing professionals in China agree with me – this is the first time the party has gone to such lengths to prevent anyone obtaining an English language book in China.

There are quite a few things that have caused them to throw their toys out of the pram over this book – not least that McGregor reveals the extent of party involvement in many Chinese corporations listed overseas. This political involvement in supposedly independent corporations is banned on most stock exchanges and should have been declared in all of them.

But the obsessively secretive party chooses never to mention its links to business. In truth, officials at most western stock exchanges have known about it but keep quiet in the interests of attracting these lucrative listings. If nothing else, the publication of McGregor’s book means that nobody can now seriously deny knowledge of these links any more.

The extent of corruption in its own ranks is another subject the party doesn’t like to talk about. McGregor’s thorough round-up of party corruption as well as an in-depth look at the massively embarrassing Shanghai party purge of a few years ago have not endeared him to Beijing.

Above the law

Speaking from London where he now works, McGregor says: “Until the party allows independent investigation of corruption, the problem will remain. Under the present system, the top leaders are basically above the law.”

This is perhaps partly why, despite occasional outbursts, there is little overt opposition by ordinary people against corruption in China. Worryingly, many now take it for granted.

McGregor recalls a vice-mayor of Beijing convicted of accepting Olympics-related bribes worth about $1m. Cheeky Chinese bloggers accused him of under-performing and that compared with many other officials he was basically clean for stealing so little.

The blogosphere in China has deemed these numerous corrupt officials the “black collar class”. One blogger daringly writes: “Their income is hidden, their life is hidden, their work is hidden – everything about them is hidden.”

Some have even gone so far – usually lampooning but occasionally seriously – to argue that corruption makes the Chinese political system more stable, or more “harmonious” as party propagandists would have it. All those middle-level communist officials who subsidise their lifestyles through corruption remain loyal to the regime that allows them their corrupt opportunities. Graft may just have become the glue that cements the Chinese party-state together.

And that may also be affecting foreign business in China. McGregor focuses mostly on the party itself, but he debunks the idea that corruption is largely a Chinese-on-Chinese problem.

He writes: “It is naive to think that corruption is just confined to the Chinese themselves. Lots of foreign companies have already been caught and punished for bribery, or paying commissions in China, including big names such as Lucent and Siemens.”

The lingering question is whether or not the seemingly endemic nature of corruption in China today is a temporary or a permanent state. McGregor sees the phenomenon of widespread corruption with little formal opposition to be linked to the country’s long-running red hot economy. “In a way corruption operates like a transaction tax, but it can only be absorbed now because the economy is growing so quickly. When the economy slows, as it eventually will, it won’t be so easy to brush the issue aside, as effectively happens now.”

So watch those GDP numbers out of Beijing – as goes the economy, so goes tolerance of corruption.

Based in China for more than 20 years, Paul French is a partner in the research publisher Access Asia.



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