Age of Ambition (39 page)

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The second thing Hu Gang taught me about bribing a judge was that you'll get nothing in return for at least six months. “Friendship is paramount,” he said. “A friendship so close that you have no secrets between you.” As we talked, he was building a small mountain of pork in his bowl. “Only after you show loyalty can you show skill—that you are able to do what you say you can do, and that you will make it worth his while every time.” He narrowed his eyes and chewed in silence for a moment while he thought it over. “With those steps,” he said, “anybody can be pinned down, and the bond is unbreakable.”

Hu Gang's strategy did not come cheap. In his first year of bribing judges, he spent a quarter of a million yuan on gifts and girls and meals. But after five years, it was paying off handsomely. He had one of the biggest auction houses in town and a modest nest egg of $1.5 million. He was in a rhythm. “I'd sleep until noon and then begin my rounds, which included taking care of everyone's mistresses,” he said.

But even then he found something wanting. “If I made three million or five million one year, all I'm thinking about is how to make more the next year. If I'm number three in town, how do I get to be number one? It's like you're running, and once you're running, there is no stopping. You just run and run and run. You don't think about the philosophical implications. Psychologically, you are in a world of your own.”

For outsiders, the scale of political corruption in China was often difficult to comprehend, in part because most were insulated from it. Visitors to China, compared to other developing countries, were not hit up for small bribes by customs officers or street cops; unless foreigners used Chinese schools or public hospitals, they didn't feel the creep of bribery into virtually every corner of Chinese society. On paper, Chinese public education was free and guaranteed, but parents knew to pay “sponsorship fees” to gain entry to top schools; in Beijing, the fees reached sixteen thousand dollars—more than double the average annual salary. Nationwide, 46 percent of parents said in a survey that strong “social connections” or fees were the only way to get their children a good education. By 2011, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, authorities were opening corruption cases at the rate of one a day for department-level officials, the equivalent of a city mayor.

Paying for power was so common that in 2012 the
Modern Chinese Dictionary
, the national authority on language, was compelled to add the word
maiguan
—“to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu. In a small town in Inner Mongolia, the post of chief planner was sold for $103,000. The municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. It followed a certain logic: in weak democracies, people paid their way into office by buying votes; in a state where there were no votes to buy, you paid the people who doled out the jobs. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive ten million dollars in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least fifty million.

Every country has corruption, but China's was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China's national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

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The combination of so much money and so little transparency was interfering with the Party's most solemn rituals. The year 2012 was to be set aside for tidy political theater—a handoff of power from one generation of senior apparatchiks to another. The plans were precise: on a single day that autumn, the incoming cast would stride across a stage at the Great Hall of the People, politely clapping for one another, in front of a sixty-foot painting of the Great Wall. But barely one month into the year, the plans began to unravel.

Wang Lijun was a former chief of police in the western city of Chongqing; he had been hailed in the Party press for his toughness and innovation, including perfecting the transplanting of organs from executed prisoners. But on February 6 he fled by car to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu and sought protection from the Americans. He told them he had uncovered a murder, and he put the blame on the family of his boss, Bo Xilai, the Party secretary of Chongqing, who was, until that instant, a leading contender to mount the stage that fall at the Great Hall. The victim was a local British businessman named Neil Heywood, a forty-one-year-old man of pale linen suits and a guarded manner, a “character in a Graham Greene novel—always immaculate, very noble, very erudite,” as a friend of Heywood's put it to the British press. Heywood had worked part time for a corporate intelligence firm founded by former MI6 officers, and he drove a Jaguar around Beijing with the license plate number 007. (Friends considered him more Walter Mitty than James Bond.) When his body was discovered that winter, in a shabby room at a mountaintop inn called the Lucky Holiday Hotel, police ascribed the death to alcohol, but the police chief told the Americans that Heywood had been working as a problem-solver for the family of Bo Xilai, and when Bo's wife soured on the Englishman, she had him poisoned to death.

Bo was the most charismatic figure in elite Chinese politics, a populist and a back-slapper. As it happened, I had met him on his way up, when he was running the Ministry of Commerce, waiting his turn for a seat on the Politburo. He was a Beijing Brahmin, the tall, camera-ready son of a Party boss, with the soft palms of a crown prince. His wife, Gu Kailai, was a star lawyer who had published a book about her success in the courtroom—“the Jackie Kennedy of China,” as an American colleague later put it. When Bo became Party secretary of Chongqing, he sensed an opportunity to outmaneuver liberal rivals, and he reinvented himself as the closest China had to Huey Long. He draped himself in the flag of Maoism and rallied citizens to sing “Red Songs” such as “Unity Is Power” and “Revolutionaries Are Forever Young.” He and his police rounded up thousands of tycoons, political rivals, and alleged criminals in a campaign of arrests and torture that he called “Smash the Black.”

When I met him, I was trailing the Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley to see what it was like to be an American pol encountering Chinese politics. We were waiting outside Bo's office when he came bursting through the door, laughing and bidding farewell to his previous appointment: a delegation of tall, thin African men, who looked very pleased to be greeted so warmly. I asked one of the ladies serving tea who these guests were.

“Sudan,” she said.

At the front door, Bo waved farewell to the Sudanese, pivoted on his heels, and threw an arm around his next visitor. Before I was ushered out of the room, Bo had peppered his welcome with English, a rare flourish for a Chinese official. Last I saw him, seated beside Daley, a fireplug of a man from the South Side of Chicago, Bo Xilai looked like a movie star.

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Had the police chief, Wang Lijun, never tried to flee, the world might never have known anything else about Bo Xilai and the world he made. But Wang's revelations were an astonishment. In the end, he received no asylum from the Americans; he walked glumly out of the consulate and into the hands of Chinese authorities, who tried him as a traitor and a taker of bribes—a clear message to anyone else who might consider defecting. But his tale could not be untold, and as it seeped out into the public, it began to corrode some of the myths at the heart of Chinese power.

The rumors of what Wang had said raced across the Web and through the alleyways. The Party censors tried to strike them down, but the political damage to Bo Xilai was fatal. Within two months, he was removed from office, and the government prepared to put him on trial for taking bribes, abusing his power, and other crimes. The Party was desperate to strike a balance between appearing to pursue justice and not allowing the airing of unseemly details. In a one-day show trial, his wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted of killing the Englishman, though it did little to tamp down public suspicions; when she turned up in court looking far heavier than her photos, Chinese viewers speculated that the defendant was a body double who had been paid to take the fall. (No matter how much the government denied it, the myth lingered; the liberal commentator Zhang Yihe wrote, “It reminds us of the boy who cried wolf, and lied and lied until nobody believed him and then he was eaten.”) Bo's downfall had a searing legacy. For one thing, it unraveled the fiction of the humble public servant in China. At a time when his official salary was the equivalent of nineteen thousand dollars a year, his extended family was found to have acquired businesses reportedly worth more than a hundred million dollars.

For foreign businesspeople, the fate of the Englishman was discomfiting. It reminded them that even as China grew and developed, gangland habits lingered beneath the surface of Chinese commerce and politics, and occasionally burst through. A British scrap metal trader named Anil Srivastav told me about a testy negotiation he was having over a load of metals. “These people came in and dragged me out. I shouted ‘Help!' but nobody looked,” he said. “They put me in this van and drove me off.” He was later released, but not before thinking, “I've only seen these things in movies.”

For the Chinese public, Bo's downfall contained an even more powerful message about the information now swirling around them: a rumor they had swapped online, denounced and banished by the censors, had been transformed overnight into a fact. On Weibo, a user named Jieyigongjiang wrote, “The attacks spread by ‘international reactionary forces' have now become truth. So what other ‘truths' exposed by foreign media should we believe?”

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Scandal was becoming the backbeat to China's rise. The combination of technology, wealth, and epic indiscretion was pulling aside the curtain that once protected Communist Party leaders from outside scrutiny. Never had the citizens of the People's Republic learned so much about the perks of those who ran it. For two years, an obscure Communist Party official named Han Feng recorded more than five hundred entries in a private diary chronicling his life as chief of the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau in the southern city of Laibin. When Han Feng's journal leaked to the Web—he never discovered how—it chronicled a life replete with banquets, extramarital affairs, and leisurely business trips, interspersed with Communist Party rituals. After one typical workday, he wrote:

November 6th, Tuesday (11–25°C, sunny): I edited a speech about “Civilized Manners.” At lunch, Li Dehui and others from Xiamen came over and we drank. Then I rested in the company dorm for the afternoon … Went to dinner, drank heavily … At 10PM, Ms. Tan Shanfang drove over and dragged me to her house. We made love three times, and again at sunrise.

Once his diary leaked, Han was arrested in March 2010. He was tried and sentenced to thirteen years for accepting over a hundred thousand dollars in bribes and real estate. In the political food chain, he was a minnow, and the Party was happy to chuck him overboard; when I read his chronicle, I was struck by the ordinariness of it all; he stood out as neither a thug nor a statesman, just a man doing what he could to grab hold of the benefits that the system dangled above him. (The three most common abuses of public funds—travel, banquets, and cars—became known as the “three publics,” and the Finance Ministry once estimated that they cost the country fourteen billion yuan—more than half the national defense budget.) On the last day of the year, Han the tobacco official took stock of his life:

Work went better this year than any year before … My authority has grown among the workers … My son is doing well, and he's been recommended for graduate school without even having to take the test. After two years, he'll get a job with no problems. My photography skills have reached a new level, and I will try to keep learning forever. Womanizing is on the right track. Hooked up with Little Ms. Pan. Regularly having a good time with Ms. Tan Shanfang, and I enjoy my time with Ms. Mo Yaodai. It's been a fine year, woman-wise, but with so many partners I need to keep an eye on my health.

Over time, Chinese bloggers learned to zoom in on official photos to find evidence of habits that did not match official salaries. They posted photographs of police departments with Maseratis and Porsches painted blue and white. They pointed out that a local real estate official named Zhou Jiugeng was often photographed smoking cigarettes that cost twenty-four dollars a pack, and after a bribery investigation he was sent to prison for eleven years. Another blogger made a specialty of exposing comrades with suspiciously expensive timepieces, and he became known as the Wristwatch Watchdog.

Censors kept as much off the Web as they could, but each new case tore another hole in the image of a Party that had always pledged to be the “first to eat bitterness, the last to benefit.” Each new case sounded less like the exception than the rule, and each new detail accentuated the gap between the Party's solemn presentation and the unadorned reality beneath. A woman went online to describe her affair with her boss, Yi Junqing, the head of the Party's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau—in effect, the chief rabbi of Marxist orthodoxy and values. The mistress described how she had paid him in cash to buy her job, and she posted three years' worth of text messages, and a lengthy narrative of sushi, sake, and lunchtime dalliances.

Another case produced a batch of photos—leaked from a computer under repair—that documented the contortions of five men and women in a hotel room orgy. Viewers quickly identified the faces of several government officials. The problem was not embarrassment; it was hypocrisy: not long before that, the government had prosecuted a computer science professor who lived with his mother and, in his spare time, organized group sex—a community in which he was known by the Internet handle Roaring Virile Fire. He was arrested and sentenced to three and a half years for “crowd licentiousness,” a relic of the days when the government charged people with “hooliganism” for sex outside of marriage. The case of Roaring Virile Fire became a rallying cry for advocates of privacy, so the news of the cadres' orgy posed something of a public relations challenge to the Party. One county government decided to declare it a case of mistaken identity, which the
People's Daily
summed up with the headline
NAKED GUY IS NOT OUR PARTY CHIEF
. (It turned out that he was.)