China's Local Leaders Hold Absolute Power

But detractors said Zhang was shadowed from the start by corruption rumors linked to his previous job running a grain bureau in Tieling, a city 60 miles southwest of here. Moreover, he seemed eager to succeed spectacularly in Xifeng to get his party career back on track. His manners were abrupt and he showed an unwillingness to listen to subordinates, including those on the party's local Standing Committee, critics said.

Residents also said he once bragged during dinner at a local hotel that he was the only law in town.

The county's deputy administrator, Jiang Yongku, tried to caution Zhang against overstepping, residents said. But Zhang had him removed and shunted over to the county's purely advisory Political Consultative Conference.

A local laborer said he got his first taste of Zhang's ways when he was assigned to help install new streetlights in the downtown area. The project, at $2.3 million, was deemed too expensive by the local Standing Committee, he said, but Zhang plowed ahead anyway.

Local residents recounting such complaints against Zhang did so on the condition of anonymity. Even though Zhang has lost his post, they feared retribution if it became known they had spoken out to a foreign reporter, they said, citing concerns that Zhang still has residual power in the local party bureaucracy.

"At first, he showed a lot of ability," said Su, the lawyer, who is based in another city. "He worked very hard, and he knew what he was doing. But then his arrogance came out."

Zhang's projects started small but grew fast. First he ordered the destruction of dilapidated buildings to create a new plaza. Then he forbade unseemly traffic from driving through it, put in the lights and had workers move what was known as the Monument to the Revolution from one side of a hill to another, apparently after consulting a feng shui expert. Before long, construction was underway on the grandiose commercial center -- replete with an "International Club" -- designed to transform Xifeng town, the county seat, from a frigid backwater into an international trading center.

To make sure offices and apartments at the center would sell, Zhang organized a system whereby each department in the Xifeng municipal government, the Xifeng county government and local provincial organs were assigned sales quotas, with an obligation to buy up their quota with public money if private buyers could not be found, according to a report in the China Youth Daily newspaper.

The goal, according to the local Propaganda Bureau, was to make Xifeng into an "aircraft carrier" for launching trade projects. But the center stayed mostly unoccupied, and the foreign businessmen never showed up.

The problem was that Xifeng had little to trade, except aphrodisiacs made from deer antlers, deer meat and deerskin from herds that roam nearby hills. Indeed, one wing of the commercial center was given over to deer-related products and included a hotel for deer shoppers.

Zhang liked to boast that the region had 100,000 deer to make money from. "Not really," said a woman in a nearly deserted deer-products shop. "That was just another of Zhang's exaggerations."

The main investor in the commercial center was the Kai Long company, from Zhang's home town of Tieling. The company offices did not answer repeated calls. But its owner, Liu Rongkai, told the party's official Tieling Daily in happier days that he saw the project as a big opportunity. Although Liu did not say so, the opportunity was particularly attractive since, according to the China Youth Daily, he had obtained low-interest loans from a provincial development bank.