Can Corruption Ruin China?
Uncle House, Brother Wristwatch, and Grandpa Wen: Can Corruption Undermine China?
Two days after Americans go to the polls, China will embark with great fanfare on its own leadership transition, anointing a new generation of men—and they almost certainly will all be men—to run the country for the next ten years. A team of seven, the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, will intone their official priorities for the new term: economic rebalancing, technological innovation, and territorial integrity, among other things. There is one issue that they will not emphasize, but it is more essential to their Party’s survival than any other: combatting corruption.
On Thursday, just twenty-one days before the solemn handover, the Times lobbed the news equivalent of a hand grenade into the affair: a forty-seven-hundred-word investigation revealing that the family of outgoing Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has amassed $2.7 billion in assets during his time in office. The news of the nest egg—which is large enough to rank the Wen clan alongside the Marriotts on the Forbes list of richest families—strikes an especially awkward blow because Wen, nicknamed Grandpa Wen for his attentions to the poor, had put himself forward as one of the Party’s moral standard-bearers. The story does not accuse him outright of corruption; it documents a culture of self-dealing and enrichment. The government promptly blacked out the Times Web site; Bloomberg has been blocked for more than four months, since publishing a report on the assets of the incoming President Xi Jinping.
Blacking out the Times is beside the point. To understand the threat that corruption has come to pose to the Party, the Chinese need look no further than their own newspapers.