China's Local Leaders Hold Absolute Power
Party Vows Reform but Moves Slowly

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

XIFENG, China -- When Zhang Zhiguo took over as Communist Party leader in Xifeng county, he was determined to make his mark, to push this impoverished corner of northeast China into the mainstream of swift economic development.

By some measures, he succeeded. During the five years of his hard-charging leadership, Xifeng's gross domestic product tripled, to more than $50 million in 2007, and Zhang was headed for promotion in the party hierarchy.

But Zhang's career came to a crashing halt in January. That is when party leaders in Beijing found out that Xifeng police had traveled 500 miles to the capital to arrest a woman who had authored a magazine article that Zhang found unflattering. On further investigation, the party leadership had other concerns as well -- about Zhang's overbearing style, for instance, and the rough treatment of homeowners who had to make way for a multimillion-dollar commercial center that seemed to make little economic sense.

A party investigating team showed up in early February. Soon afterward, Zhang was fired, with no public explanation. The night he left town in disgrace, Xifeng residents said, they set off fireworks in celebration.

Zhang's stormy passage through Xifeng was in some ways extraordinary. But in many other ways, his exercise of absolute power was typical of the way China's Communist Party operates in thousands of cities, towns and counties across the country. Despite three decades of widely heralded economic reforms, the party has clung tenaciously to its Leninist-inspired monopoly on politics. As a result, most of China's 1.3 billion people still live under the thumb of local party secretaries who are responsible only to the higher-level party officials who appoint them.

China's leaders have said the country is evolving politically, without setting any timetable for reforms. In the meantime, they have interpreted their hosting of the Olympic Games in August as an international endorsement of their contention that the pace must be slow. For the moment, as Zhang's time in Xifeng showed, the top-down Communist system still insists on concentrating power in the hands of party functionaries who manage local politics and finances beyond challenge from the law.

The party has carried out numerous reforms in recent years to improve the competence of such officials and guarantee their honesty. The May 12 earthquake in central China has become an obvious test of these reforms; leaders have warned that party officials will be judged by their response to the disaster.

With President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao providing strenuous leadership from the top, the party apparatus pushed hard to mobilize help in quake-hit zones as soon as the scale of the catastrophe became clear. Participation was broad, but it was all under the guidance of party officials. Ultimately, governance in Sichuan province differs little from that of Xifeng and other localities: The party refuses to allow outside powers, such as an independent judiciary, a probing press or a genuine legislature, that could keep tabs on bureaucrats.

"The Xifeng case was very typical of China," said Su Chunyu, a Liaoning province lawyer who has followed events here closely. "It was typical of the way politics work and typical of the way the law works."

Zhang, in his mid-50s, parted his jet-black hair smartly near the middle and seemed almost always to wear a suit and tie, residents recalled, setting him off as an important figure in this little town.

According to Liang Yunfei, head of the party's Propaganda Bureau in Xifeng county, Zhang had arrived here in 2002 as a county administrator and, by the following year, had been appointed party secretary.

Liang described him as a charismatic leader who quickly demonstrated a determination to think big even in a small arena. He was doing what China's modern party secretaries are assigned to do: forge alliances between government and business to promote investment and improve the economic standing of those living under the secretary's sway.

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.

In a telephone interview, Zhang denied any improprieties and defended the colossal commercial center as Xifeng's "only chance for development."

The project was seen as less of an opportunity by hundreds of Xifeng families whose land was confiscated to make room for construction. Many complained that the compensation they received was far below market value. Others charged that Zhang abused China's eminent domain regulations to favor Liu's company.

A delegation tried to go to Beijing to lodge a complaint with the citizen petition bureau. But Xifeng policemen, commanded by Zhang's inseparable companion, Wang Weidong of the Public Security Bureau, blocked the roads and checked all cars leaving town, upset townspeople said.

One property owner in particular, Zhao Junping, 40, was outraged, refusing to accept Zhang's seizure of her family-run gasoline station. She fought the confiscation with legal objections and lost, then in spite sent friends a text message with a little poem accusing Zhang of "corruption and crimes." Her suggestion was that Zhang was getting illicit money from Liu as part of the land confiscations -- an allegation Zhang has denied.

Zhao was soon jailed on charges of libel, which can be a criminal offense under Chinese law. Subsequently, she was also accused of tax fraud. After a trial at which both charges were heard simultaneously, she was convicted and sentenced Dec. 28 to 3 1/2 years in prison.

Zhao's fate was the subject of an article by Zhu Wenna on Jan. 1 in Faren Magazine, which is published by the official Legal Daily in Beijing. Seven days later, Xifeng policemen showed up at Faren's Beijing offices to arrest Zhu, leading to widespread outrage in the capital and, eventually, to the investigating team dispatched to Xifeng by party headquarters.

Local residents said they assume investigators from the party's Discipline Inspection Commission are still looking into Zhang's finances and his record here with an eye to possible prosecution. But, in keeping with the party's practice of secrecy, there has been no announcement. Zhang declined to comment but said he has received no official notification.

A new Xifeng county party secretary, Ye Desong, has arrived, meanwhile, and the Public Security Bureau has a new chief. The county's 400,000 residents are left to trade rumors about Zhang's fate and predictions about what the new party mandarins will be like.

Researcher Liu Songjie contributed to this report.