March 9, 2000
As It Takes On Corruption, China Executes an
Official
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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
EIJING, March 8 -- China
executed a former provincial vice governor today for taking bribes. He
was the highest official put to death for corruption in the 50 years
since the Communists came to power.
The execution followed Prime Minister Zhu Rongji's promise this
week to stamp out the rampant corruption that extends to the highest
ranks of the Communist Party.
Hu Changqing, the former vice governor of eastern Jiangxi Province
and a former deputy director of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs,
was sentenced to death in February for taking bribes worth more than
$600,000. He was executed today after the Supreme People's Court
rejected his appeal on Tuesday.
Both the timing of the execution, just days after Mr. Zhu's speech,
and extensive publicity made it clear that the Communist Party
intended to make an example of Mr. Hu. Party officials are well aware
that widespread corruption among officials and their families has
seriously damaged the party's reputation.
In a country where executions are often carried out quietly, Mr.
Hu's death -- and his misdeeds -- were featured in the official press
and on the main evening news, which showed Mr. Hu, a small balding man
in a business suit, being escorted by police guards. Even the
television program "Daily Focus," China's popular investigative news
magazine, devoted its entire show to Mr. Hu's downfall.
"For such a flagrant criminal, only the death penalty is sufficient
to safeguard national law, satisfy popular indignation, rectify the
party work style and fight against corruption," said a commentary
today in The People's Daily, the main Communist Party newspaper.
The commentary urged officials to draw lessons from the case and
not to be "attracted by all sorts of temptations during reform and
opening to the outside world."
In his opening speech to the yearly session of Parliament on
Sunday, Prime Minister Zhu repeatedly referred to corruption as one of
China's most pressing issues.
"All major cases, no matter which department or who is involved,
must be thoroughly investigated, and corrupt officials must be
severely punished," he said.
Mr. Zhu, who is widely admired by Chinese as upright and honest,
has made the fight against corruption something of a personal crusade,
a campaign that has popular support.
"This is a pressing issue for the party," said a party member who
is a researcher at a government think tank. "There are many people,
myself included, who feel that the party is now just as corrupt as the
Kuomintang."
But Mr. Hu, though high in rank, was not among the party's elite.
Earlier this year, when the wife of the Beijing party chief, Jia
Qinglin, was linked to a $10 billion smuggling ring involving the
giant Yuanhua Company on Xiamen island in southern China, the
government propaganda machine went out of its way to profess her
innocence. Although the case has not been officially reported in
China, many people in Beijing have followed it closely through the
Internet from Hong Kong and the few snippets that have appeared in
newspapers and magazines in southern China.
Mr. Jia is a protégé of President Jiang Zemin and was brought to
Beijing specifically because he was regarded as an honest
administrator. His predecessor, Chen Xitong, was sentenced in 1998 to
16 years in prison for corruption.
In official interviews, Mr. Jia's wife, Lin Youfan, said she had
never heard of Yuanhua, which many Chinese say is hard to believe
considering she was head of a large import-export company in Xiamen
until two years ago. They believe she is being spared to protect her
husband's career.
"Yes, the party is serious about cracking down on corruption, but
I've still not seen any real willingness to go above a certain level,"
said one Western diplomat. "The people who are being arrested are
those who are dispensable, or whose connections are not good -- or at
least not as good as they thought they were."
