Entertainer-in-Chief

First, consider the category of incompetent and corrupt, illustrated by Guo Yongchang, Party secretary of Gushi, a rural county in Henan province that is officially designated poor and receives financial assistance from higher-level governments to get by. We can learn a lot about Guo because he is the star of The Transition Period, a documentary that filmed the party secretary’s daily activities. To classify Guo as incompetent may be unfair because, even though he failed to make his county rich, the documentary shows Guo hard at work all day. He is absorbed in endless meetings, hijacked by ad-hoc crises, intervenes to help workers get their owed wages, and above all, tries hard to promote growth. The most consuming aspect of his work was attracting investors, with whom he negotiated, drank, sang karaoke, and entertained constantly. In a darkly comic scene, an intoxicated Guo smeared a birthday cake on an American investor. Then, the next day, hung over but reflective, he expressed an earnest desire to make a difference to Gushi. “Failing to develop is the worst kind of corruption,” he said.Footnote ²

In the final minutes of the film, Guo was hauled away on charges of corruption. Subsequent investigation revealed that he paid a higher-level official 100,000 Yuan for his promotion to county Party secretary.Footnote ³ Unlike Bo or Ji, Guo did not turn around the fortunes of his jurisdiction. Despite an increase in foreign investment during Guo’s tenure from 800 million Yuan in 2004 to 3.8 billion Yuan in 2009, Gushi remained poor. Worse, the county government incurred a large deficit of 700 million Yuan, as Guo squandered public funds on white elephant projects, including a new government compound costing 200 million Yuan that local media described as “extravagant like a four-star hotel.”Footnote ⁴

Nice Guys Don’t Get Ahead

Then we turn to a second variety of officials, incompetent and not corrupt, but who nonetheless are punished by the Party. Under China’s cadre evaluation system, officials can be held responsible for scandals and protests that occur during their tenure, even though they are not directly involved and did not cause them.Footnote ⁵ Tong Mingqian, party secretary of Hengyang city in Hunan Province, is a case in point. (Tong is one of 54 city Party secretaries whose downfall during Xi’s anti-corruption crackdown I analyze in Chapter 6.)

In 2013, Tong was apprehended in association with a massive vote-buying scandal that broke out in his city when he was party secretary. In this case, 518 members of Hengyang’s people’s congress, the city legislative body, took a total of 110 million Yuan in bribes from 56 candidates in exchange for voting them into the provincial legislature.Footnote ⁶ Although Tong did not instigate the scheme, nor did he take bribes, he was punished for “dereliction of duty,” stripped of party membership and removed from office.Footnote ⁷

Unlike Bo, Ji, and Guo, Tong was famously clean, even morally stiff and uptight. He refused extravagant dinners, preferring to pack dinner home from the staff canteen and pay for his own meals. “He doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink. His only hobby is to take a stroll in the Party secretary’s compound after work, with an old security guard at his side,” a local newspaper reported. One day, three businessmen who failed to get elected after bribing the city’s legislators barged into Tong’s office, demanding justice; instead of throwing the rascals behind bars, the Party secretary offered to get their money back.

In the Chinese political system, Tong’s “nice guy” (laohaoren) qualities are perceived as spinelessness, despised by bureaucratic superiors and even the media, which wrote dismissively, “Lacking audacity and authority, even county Party secretaries didn’t take him seriously.”Footnote ⁸ Throughout his career, Tong never made a splash, but he hoped that by toeing party lines and avoid making enemies, he could peacefully retire. Tragically, even this modest wish was dashed, as the Party punished him for inaction on the vote-buying scandal. Nice guys, apparently, don’t get ahead in Chinese politics.

Sleepless in Datong

Lastly, a fourth, ideal variety: competent and not corrupt. A good example is Geng Yanbo, Mayor of Datong, featured in the documentary, The Chinese Mayor.Footnote ⁹ Bearing clear resemblance to Ji Jianye, Geng is an insomniac bent on rejuvenating the smog-filled city of Datong through massive urban renewal projects. One review of the documentary aptly describes Geng as “a sort of human bulldozer.”Footnote ¹⁰ At the time the film was made, Geng was abruptly transferred from Datong to Taiyuan, where he still serves as Party secretary. Given that no charges of corruption have been made against Geng, we may assume, for now, that he isn’t corrupt. But even officials in this ideal group are controversial because, in China’s growth-obsessed autocracy, the use of state power is almost always disruptive.

Providing a count of how many officials fall into each of the four categories is not the task of this analysis. In practice, this is extremely difficult to do, as we will see in Chapter 6 (even when certain officials are exposed for corruption, we cannot know whether the remaining ones are innocent). Nevertheless, by identifying these four varieties of officials, we will see that portrayal of the entire Chinese bureaucracy as “predatory” (grab and give nothing in return) is too simplistic. Even the corrupt leader Guo Yongchang doesn’t entirely fit the caricature of “looting, debauchery, and utter lawlessness.”Footnote ¹¹ Even he was dedicated to growth promotion and had defused social conflicts and raised investment.