Beijing Newspeak

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned open day to demonstrate Party transparency. On Thursday, the Communist Party’s internal disciplinary body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, allowed foreign reporters a little peek around its offices for the first time.

The AP reporter wrote a fairly matter-of-fact story on the landmark stroll around the office compound, choosing to focus on a senior official’s comments that corruption among Party officials is falling. Xinhua seemed genuinely concerned as to whether the foreign reporters were having a good time, noting that Shiozawa Eiichi, a Kyodo News journalist, wanted to see things in more detail next time (presumptuous really given the next CPC congress after October isn’t for another five years) and that The Australian correspondent Rowan Callick thought more time should have been allocated to the Q&A session. The AFP reporter took a sardonic approach to convey how the commission puts the “open” in open day with this article cheekily headlined “Little sign of overwork in China’s anti-graft body”. Here’s an entertaining chunk:

Case workers greeted the visitors politely from behind spotless desks unburdened by the files and documents that would indicate corruption is a growing problem.

“We do not get all the cases at once. They come in steadily and we handle them quickly,” Liu Zhenbao, an official in charge of case reviews, cheerfully told reporters.

The body’s case-inspection department seemed nearly deserted. The explanation: staff are all out in the field investigating cases.

And officials repeatedly pleaded that “time is short, it is time to move on” when pressed with sensitive questions about the nexus of corruption and politics in China.

To be fair to the disciplinary commission, you don’t leave coffee-stained files piled high on your desk when you have visitors (and there has to be some sort of evidence that corruption is down). But the whistlestop nature of the press tour was evident.

“This is a reflection of our openness and the development of democracy in China,” Chi said, before reporters were hurried onto a waiting bus.

So corruption cases are down and no one is doing any work. I was wondering why the State Council felt the need to set up another anti-graft department, the National Bureau for Corruption Prevention, just over a week ago. The establishment of this agency and the subsequent appointment of Minister of Supervison Ma Wen as its head left everyone wondering, what does the Ministry of Supervision do then?

According to this China Daily report, the significance of the new bureau is clear.

The setting up of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention (NBCP) signifies the opening of a new front that can “nip corruption in the bud”.

The paper doesn’t give a reason for the quotation marks but, to its credit, does go on to present a balanced and informative story by interviewing Tsinghua University professor Ren Jianming.

Tsinghua University professor Ren Jianming thinks it’s imperative that a “comparatively independent institution” will improve corruption prevention policies. “It will be much better (because) sometimes certain departments’ proposals are laced with vested interests.”

I agree, comparative independence is vital. So why are the head and deputy head of the bureau and the Ministry of Supervision the same people? It continues:

But experts doubt whether the 30-member bureau will live up to people’s expectations. Ren worries “whether the bureau will have enough talent and professionals to detect corruption at source in so many complicated fields”.

“It will become a beautiful but useless vase if it’s made up of all kinds of officials and staff who can only do some administrative things instead of the vital research work.” Hence Ren suggests the bureau introduce “outside brains” by inviting some professionals from certain fields to overcome the difficulty.

A few experts are also worried that the State-level bureau will prompt local governments to form similar organizations, resulting in over-swollen staff and more supervisory cost.

Though NBCP chief Ma Wen brushes aside such worries saying that at present local governments don’t have any intention to set up similar organizations, Li (Chengyan, Peking University professor) feels local governments would do so, but maybe under a different name.

“We expect to see all anti-corruption resources being gradually incorporated into one bureau, which will be more independent and effective,” Li says.

The bureau lacks independence so is destined, ultimately, to fail. This problem can of course be traced right down to the local level, where recent efforts to increase supervision in China’s villages were exposed as relatively worthless. Take this recent Xinhua story which features a district government official in Ningxia exalting a new “village supervisor” system. Apparently complaints are down by half since supervisors were introduced to the region’s villages in November 2006. Ask enough questions though and the fact that strips away the credibility of the system emerges:

However, it remains to be seen how effective the scheme, which has also been introduced to Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangxi, will be in the long-term.

Eighty percent of the newly-appointed village supervisors in Ningxia are actually the deputy heads of the villages and receive no extra salary to perform the role of supervisor.

Again, insufficient independence. Any corruption that may be occurring at village level would surely involve the head and deputy head of the village. So if the dodgy deputy head is appointed to supervise his immediate superior they can carry on as normal. In fact, it’s no wonder the volume of complaints is down. Villagers petition the new “village supervisor” who can choose whether or not to pass the complaints, which might implicate him in shady dealing, higher up.

Gordon C Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China (it is coming, honest!)”, saw the establishment of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention as an opportunity to denounce Communism in general in this article in Commentary Magazine. Some snippets:

Corruption has reached new levels in China because of the Communist Party’s insistence on political monopoly. Such rampant corruption nearly guarantees that problems will not be dealt with effectively.

and:

Beijing is now reduced to imposing death sentences on corrupt officials and announcing four-month campaigns to stop bad products. But we know that corruption makes all these efforts meaningless. And adding another sprawling bureaucracy won’t help. After all, the most corrupt organization in China—the Communist Party—cannot discipline itself.

The reactionary tone of this piece does make me cringe, particularly his Soviet Union angle and his quick rejection of the long-term value in China tightening its regulatory system. Still, I’ll certainly agree with this line: “another sprawling bureaucracy won’t help”.