Quotes of the Day

A posting to Lianjiang doesn't seem like a promotion. The rural county's neighborhoods of tight wooden houses lean toward the concrete banks of the Ao River like drunkards looking for support and not finding much. But winning the job of Communist Party Secretary there was Huang Jingao's big chance. He'd oversee the completion of renovations to the county town's riverfront and then could reasonably expect promotion to a bigger town in his coastal province, Fujian. The county's top position was a reward to the 52-year-old cadre for exposing corruption and braving death threats in a nearby city, and now he expected a quieter time. "I really did not want to be drawn into that kind of case again," he wrote in August.

He's been drawn into a bigger one. In an essay called "Why Have I Worn a Bulletproof Vest for Six Years?" he accused fellow officials in Lianjiang of corruption. The article appeared on a website run by the Party's flagship People's Daily and became a must-read among knowledgeable Chinese—even though it was wiped off the Internet within 24 hours and Chinese media were barred from covering the case. The misconduct Huang alleges is almost banal—he says local officials deprived residents of their homes and manipulated land prices. What makes the case sensational is the rare dragon's-eye view given by a Party insider. So far, it has done Huang little good. Local officials insist he has not been detained, but he has been intensively questioned by a team of provincial investigators staying in Lianjiang and has been ordered to stop talking about his letter.

Corruption in China is widespread. The report of the recently concluded plenum of the Communist Party's Central Committee noted "serious corruption in some areas, departments and units" and called the "struggle against corruption" a "major political task." In the first half of this year, government prosecutors opened 20,000 cases against officials who were allegedly taking bribes. Last year, according to the government, more than 250 officials were removed for buying their positions in the Manchurian province of Heilongjiang—the post of county Party chief went for $35,000. Just last month, prosecutors revealed an investigation of 200 education officials in the western province of Sichuan who were implicated in taking bribes from textbook publishers, with one accused of pocketing $75,000 and passing the cost to university students, according to the Sichuan government. The vice director of Beijing's transportation department, who was arrested on August 15, was quoted by state media as having explained away the million dollars in cash reportedly found in his apartment as minor gifts and "tea money." And at the conclusion of the Party plenum, it was announced that Tian Fengshan, a former Minister of Land and Natural Resources, had been expelled from the committee and the Party because of "corruption charges."

Impressive as these busts are, China's anticorruption strategy may have a flaw. Instead of encouraging independent law-enforcement agencies and the media to expose officials who take bribes, Communist Party leaders increasingly emphasize internal Party discipline as the crucial weapon in fighting corruption. The day before the Central Committee meeting, President Hu Jintao, in a major speech, called for deepening the "anticorruption struggle." In his speech, Hu ruled out Western-style democracy for China. But without some outside check on behavior, it is not clear how corrupt officials can be brought into line. "Letting people choose their leaders would help stop corruption, but obviously that's not acceptable," says Zhong Dajun, a Beijing-based essayist.

In truth, even well-intentioned Party cadres can find themselves between a rock and a hard place. For China, economic growth has become dogma. Small-town leaders are under intense pressure to deliver the visible trappings of development. But as is true from New Jersey to Nigeria, when rivers of fresh concrete flow, corruption is never far away—especially when local officials are chronically underpaid (the salary of a typical township magistrate in China is about $250 a month before bonuses and adjustments). For a local official to crack down on corruption can mean that cherished development projects get delayed. Indeed, in Lianjiang, Huang's exposé has stalled the county's first apartment complex financed by outside investors. "If this becomes a big scandal, nobody will want to invest there again," says a senior Party member in Fuzhou, the provincial capital, who has seen minutes of meetings regarding Huang's case.

Huang has a history of fighting graft. After serving in the People's Liberation Army, he rose to become head of the finance commission in Fuzhou. While helping lead an investigation into illegal pig slaughterhouses, he received death threats and his own deputy was beaten to death in an orange grove. The city issued him a bulletproof vest that he wore proudly around his office. The investigation led to jail terms for five prominent Party officials. On the day Huang reported for duty at Lianjiang in January 2002, a hundred residents stopped him to say the government had torn down their homes and rescinded promises of compensation. Huang concluded that the city had transferred riverfront land to a developer for half its real value. The giveaway was greased, Huang says, by gifts from the contractor to officials. He ordered 33 of them to return their gifts and halted construction. The company that won the riverfront-development contract, Yuansheng Real Estate Corp., denies all wrongdoing and says Huang ordered the detention of a company official for nearly a year without charge.

Huang's bosses in the provincial capital created their own team to investigate his allegations. But the implicit tension between growth and fighting graft was visible when the team was told to "strike a balance between the struggle against corruption and economic development," according to documents released by the city to rebut Huang's essay. In the event, the committee ruled that the case was an "economic dispute" rather than corruption and that construction should continue. After lobbying against the ruling for two years, Huang contacted the People's Daily website, which posted his essay after dispatching reporters to interview him. The essay blamed leaders in the provincial capital for putting up with corruption as a normal cost of development, something Huang called "perplexing and incomprehensible." He clearly knew what he was up against. "Many of my actions have broken the unspoken rules of officialdom," he writes. "It is these unspoken rules that indulge corruption and corrode the body of our Party."

The night that Huang posted his essay, Fuzhou's Party secretary called an emergency meeting and declared that Huang had made "serious mistakes," according to an official rebuttal posted on the city's website. The next day, Fuzhou investigators drove to meet Huang. At day's end, they declared that he had deceived the public by saying he wore a bulletproof vest; everyone they'd talked to, the Fuzhou officials' response said, denied seeing him wear it. A day later, Huang was accused of a "serious violation of organizational discipline." His essay, said the rebuttal, would be "used by hostile forces in the West, in Taiwan and among dissidents to make our society politically unstable."

The government's rebuttal hints that Huang himself "violated rules of honest governance" but provides no details. "He ran the town like a king, with no regard for the law," says Zhou Hongwen, the vice chairman of Yuansheng Real Estate Corp. But back in Lianjiang, residents say they glued posters supporting Huang on the wall of Party headquarters. They were removed. "Eight people lived in my mother's house, and now where will they go?" asks one woman living near a Christian church, also slated for destruction. "Officials are stuffing themselves on our rice, and we're going hungry."

• Matthew Forney | Lianjiang
• In small-town China, a case of alleged corruption sheds light on what happens when poorly paid local officials are encouraged to go all out for economic growth