China has launched a sweeping crackdown on graft in the boom city of Shenzhen, seeking to rein in unruly officials and soothe public anger over high-level vice, analysts said.
The campaign, which has already cost the city mayor his job, comes just three years after an anti-corruption drive led to a trail of top officials and businessmen being jailed in Shanghai in a similar case.
“It is a large-scale anti-corruption case in a province at the forefront of reforms, where there is large money,” said Willy Lam (林和立), an expert on Chinese politics at the Jamestown Foundation, a US think tank. “It is not surprising there is corruption there, and a high degree of collusion between politics and business.”
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) has repeatedly insisted that fighting corruption is a question of “life and death” for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the fact that the battle is now taken to Shenzhen only raises the stakes.
Just a fishing village a generation ago, Shenzhen is now a city of 11 million people.
Its hypermodern skyline is seen as testimony to the achievements of China’s market experiments, but to many the emerging corruption case reflects the dark side of reform.
Shenzhen Mayor Xu Zongheng (許宗衡), 53, was placed under internal CCP investigation earlier this month for “serious violations of discipline,” state media reported.
Such charges often result in graft convictions in China’s judicial system.
It may have especially triggered Beijing’s ire that Xu reportedly bought his way to power, challenging the party’s monopoly on appointments.
“It’s very important for the party to ensure subordination and discipline among officials,” said Joseph Cheng (鄭宇碩), a China watcher at City University of Hong Kong.
Media reports say Xu is also being probed for links to Huang Guangyu (黃光裕), formerly China’s second-richest man and the founder of Gome Electrical Appliances. Huang was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of financial crimes, including manipulation of the stock market.
Xu’s wife as well as a vice mayor, a former assistant minister of police, and a leading Guangdong politician may also be under investigation for alleged links to Huang, local media have said.
Some have pointed to echoes of the case surrounding Chen Liangyu (陳良宇), Shanghai’s former top party official, who was convicted of accepting bribes and abusing his power. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison in April 2008, becoming the highest CCP leader to be jailed for graft since 1995.
“There is a bit of an impression that after Shanghai comes Guangdong,” said Jean-Philippe Beja, a Hong Kong-based China scholar with the French National Center for Scientific Research and a prolific writer on Chinese politics.
Meanwhile, Lam said the crackdown was unlikely to expand much further: “The campaign is coming to an end: morale is very low in Guangdong, officials are afraid and need to be reassured.”
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
‘VERY DIRE’: This year’s drought, exacerbated by El Nino, is affecting 44 percent of Malawi’s crop area and up to 40 percent of its population of 20.4 million In the worst drought in southern Africa in a century, villagers in Malawi are digging for potentially poisonous wild yams to eat as their crops lie scorched in the fields. “Our situation is very dire, we are starving,” 76-year-old grandmother Manesi Levison said as she watched over a pot of bitter, orange wild yams that she says must cook for eight hours to remove the toxins. “Sometimes the kids go for two days without any food,” she said. Levison has 30 grandchildren under her care. Ten are huddled under the thatched roof of her home at Salima, near Lake Malawi, while she boils