Age of Ambition (38 page)

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 4 percent kickback on railway deals; another said he netted $152 million 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 indulging 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 the libidinous 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, had acquired a luxury home near Los Angeles, stirring speculation that he had been preparing to join the growing exodus of officials who were taking their fortunes abroad. In recent years, corrupt cadres who sent their families overseas had become known in Chinese as “naked officials.” In 2011 the central bank posted to the Web an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials had fled the country, having stolen $120 billion—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. (The report was promptly removed.)

In the months 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: he had produced a railway system that, even with problems, was fundamentally changing the sense of distance and time for ordinary people across the country. On the other side, 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 had become 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 after the crash, I met a subcontractor for the railway and I asked him 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.”

*   *   *

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 for tests; it halted construction of new lines; and it ordered trains to slow down from a top speed of 217 miles per hour to 186. 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 spent five months in a Chinese hospital recovering from broken bones, neurological damage, and the loss of his kidney and spleen. After returning to his family in Colorado, he had to close his camera supply business. He and his brother, Leo, flew to China to retrieve their parents' bodies. They asked to hold a memorial in their ancestral village in Fujian, but the government forbade it; the parents were buried in a cemetery on Long Island.

Liu Zhijun would eventually go on trial. The verdict was no mystery—98 percent of Chinese trials end in conviction—but a reliable predictor of Liu's fate was that the Party had already embarked on one of its most enduring rituals. Just as technicians once airbrushed political casualties out of the archives, censors had already taken to the Web to begin excising years' worth of glowing news reports and documentaries that hailed Liu's accomplishments, leaving behind only squibs about his arrest. Before long, Great Leap Liu had been expunged so thoroughly from the history of China's achievements that you might never have known he existed.

By that point, the Wenzhou collision had already come to symbolize the essential risks facing the Communist Party. The crash struck at the middle-class men and women who had accepted the grand bargain of modern Chinese politics in the era after socialism: allow the Party to reign unchallenged as long as it was 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 was a merciless judgment. Gerald Ollivier, a senior infrastructure specialist at the World Bank in Beijing, pointed out that trains in China were 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 were more inclined to quote a very different statistic: in forty-seven years of service, high-speed trains in Japan had recorded just one fatality, a passenger caught in a closing door. It was becoming clear that parts of the new China had been built too fast for their own good. Three years had been set aside for construction of one of the longest bridges in North China, but it was finished in eighteen months, and nine months later, in August 2012, it collapsed, killing three people and injuring five. Local officials blamed overloaded trucks, though it was the sixth bridge collapse in a single year.

People were no longer satisfied simply with the fortune delivered by China's rise. The fall of Great Leap Liu had dramatized a culture of entitlement run amok. For years, Liu had dedicated himself to enhancing his own prospects along with those of the nation. He had lost his sense of proportion, and the question was whether the government he served had, too.

 

SEVENTEEN

ALL THAT GLITTERS

 

The first thing that Hu Gang taught me about bribing a judge was the importance of food. “Everyone says no to the first invitation. After three or four invitations, any man agrees—and once you eat together, you're on the way to becoming family.” For all the talk about corruption in China, the details about how it actually worked—the subtle mechanics, the rituals, the taboos—remained mysterious to me. Over the years, I had gathered snippets of understanding, from spending time in Macau or learning the story of Great Leap Liu or reading Hu Shuli's investigations, but those provided only fragments of a picture. When I met Hu Gang, he began to fill in the rest.

At first glance, Hu Gang was not an obvious tutor in the dark arts of success. By the time I met him, he was a novelist—a small, fastidious man of fifty, who fussed with worried pride over his daughter and heeded her reminders not to overdo it at lunch. But like many before him, when opportunity was everywhere, he had found it impossible to resist. In college Hu had studied philosophy, and after graduation he began a quiet career in the university's Human Resources Department. When China's economy took off, he found a job at an auction house, selling classical Chinese paintings and earning a commission on every piece. “I discovered that many of the paintings and scrolls that people sent us were bogus, which fascinated me,” he told me one day over lunch. “I thought, well, I can still sell these things at a high price, even though, in my heart, I wasn't comfortable with it.”

His discomfort did not last. He was so inundated by fake art that he eventually tried his own hand at it, and discovered, to his surprise, that he had a gift for approximating the vigorous brush strokes of a Qi Baishi and the realism of a Xu Beihong. He also expanded his auction business to handle foreclosures, in which a single signature from a judge bestowed the right to a hefty commission on the sale of buildings, land, and other assets. Everyone seemed to be in on the take, Hu said. “So, I began to think, if they can do it, why can't I?”

But as with so much in China, there was competition; many people were jockeying for the chance to bribe a few people with power, and Hu realized immediately that he had to go beyond gifts. He had to build personal connections, and in that regard, he turned out to be a natural; he bribed judges first with cigarettes, then banquets, then trips to massage parlors. Nobody taught him how to do it, but he was a meticulous man, and he developed certain rules to live by: never offer a bribe to a stranger; schedule cash gifts for the fall, when the tuition bills come around. Before long, he was juggling relationships with so many judges that he had to make three trips to a massage parlor in a single day. “Three times, one day,” he said, fixing me with a look of alarm. “That's not pleasant. That's exhausting.”

*   *   *

For centuries, every generation of Chinese leaders unveiled its own strategy to root out corruption. The fourteenth-century emperor Zhu Yuanzhang ordered thieving officials to be executed, skinned, and stuffed with straw so that their carcasses might be propped up like mannequins for visitors to behold. The effects did not last. High office remained such a reliable path to riches that when a courtier named Heshen was finally brought low in 1799, he was found to have amassed a fortune worth ten times the entire government's annual budget. In 1935 the author and translator Lin Yutang observed, “In China, though a man may be arrested for stealing a purse, he is not arrested for stealing the national treasury.”

In the modern age, corruption and growth have flourished together. In the eighties, a carton of Chinese Double Happiness cigarettes and a couple of bottles of Red Star grain alcohol were enough to secure a job transfer or the ration coupon for a washing machine. But in 1992, when the government began to open up the distribution of land and factories for private ownership, the corruption boom was under way. In the first year, the average sum recovered in corruption cases more than tripled, to six thousand dollars. Double Happiness cigarettes eventually 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 the bribes moved straight up the ranks. Officials and businessmen looked out for one another by organizing themselves into “protective umbrellas,” a step in what Chinese scholars called the “Mafiazation” of the state.

If the effects were abstract at first, they soon became vivid. In case after case, the disasters that enraged the Chinese public were traced back to graft, fraud, embezzlement, and patronage: The schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake had been compromised by kickbacks; the train that crashed in Wenzhou was managed by one of the country's most corrupt agencies. In the case of the tainted infant formula that killed children in 2008, dairy farmers and dealers first bribed state inspectors to ignore the presence of chemicals. Then, when children fell ill, the dairy company bribed news organizations to suppress the story.

With creativity, anything could become a bribe. Businessmen arranged poker games in which the officials were guaranteed to win. Alcohol was such a reliable choice that the state media conceded that sales of the country's most famous liquor, Kweichow Moutai, was “an index for China's corruption.” It was selling so well in 2011 that the company paid the largest dividend in the history of China's stock markets. Demand was heavy enough that the company had to ration it to stores.

I once dropped by the home of Mao Yushi, a liberal economist who happened to live near the headquarters of China's powerful planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission. He pointed out that the commission was surrounded by gift shops selling alcohol and porcelain. Citizens seeking help knew to stock up before going in for their meetings. “All these people from out of town enter the building carrying big bags and small bags, and they leave empty-handed,” the economist observed. “When the cadres get off work, they leave the building carrying all the big bags and small bags, but they can't possibly consume everything, so they sell it back to the gift shops, who in turn sell them to yet more people on a mission to Beijing. That's what our street has become.”

Public servants—officially earning twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year—became such frequent shoppers at Gucci and Louis Vuitton that high-end boutiques in Beijing ran out of stock whenever the National People's Congress was in session. (Politicians learned to call ahead to reserve their favorite items.) In some cases, a businessman would accompany an official through the aisles, but if that was too conspicuous, he could leave a credit card on file, to be charged as needed. Most of the time, it was hard to know who was paying whom, but occasionally a court case provided a peek at how the money was changing hands. When police in Macau arrested Ao Man Long, the region's secretary for transport and public works, he had a collection of what he called “friendship notebooks,” which documented a hundred million U.S. dollars in kickbacks.