Ex-president Jiang urges Beijing to curb anti-corruption drive; Jiang sent a message saying “the footprint of this anti-corruption campaign cannot get too big” in a warning to Xi not to take on too many of the powerful families

March 31, 2014 4:08 pm

Ex-president Jiang urges Beijing to curb anti-corruption drive

By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing and Simon Rabinovitch in Shanghai

Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president, has urged the current leadership to rein in the toughest anti-corruption campaign in decades, which is threatening the interests of some Communist party elders.

Mr Jiang, who stepped down as president of China in 2003 but retained control of the military for a further two years, has sent a clear signal in the past month to Xi Jinping, the president, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Mr Jiang sent a message saying “the footprint of this anti-corruption campaign cannot get too big” in a warning to Mr Xi not to take on too many of the powerful families or patronage networks at the top of the party hierarchy.

Former President Hu Jintao, who was replaced by Mr Xi a year ago, has also expressed reservations about the anti-corruption drive and warned his successor not to expand it too far, according to one person involved in executing the campaign.

President Xi has made tackling corruption and official largesse the centrepiece of his presidency, vowing to tackle powerful “tigers” (high-ranking officials) as well as “flies” at lower levels in the bureaucracy.

In the coming weeks, the authorities are expected to reveal public charges against one of the biggest tigers in the Chinese system: Zhou Yongkang, the former head of the domestic security apparatus.

Mr Zhou was detained by Communist party investigators late last year along with hundreds of family members and allies throughout the security services, energy industry and political bureaucracy.

If he is put on public trial, he will be the most senior Chinese official to face such charges since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Mr Hu and Mr Jiang have been broadly supportive of the anti-corruption drive until now and both accepted Mr Xi’s decision to purge Mr Zhou, even though Mr Zhou was a Jiang ally for many years, according to people familiar with top leadership discussions.

But both leaders think the campaign has gone far enough and that further escalation could harm their own interests or those of their respective factions.

In Mr Hu’s case, there have been persistent rumours that Mr Xi intends to open investigations into key allies, including Ling Jihua, head of the United Front Work Department of the Communist party.

Mr Ling’s son died in a Ferrari crash in 2012 that raised questions about the wealthy lifestyles of “princeling” children of top officials.

Apart from concerns about attacks on their patronage networks, Mr Hu and Mr Jiang are worried that a campaign that lasted too long and was too harsh could erode support among the Communist party’s rank and file and threaten the stability of its rule.

“There is a crucial moment in negotiated transitions and in some velvet revolutions when a large portion of existing power holders start defecting,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at the University of Oxford. “The Chinese Communist party has studied those histories closely and is well aware that its most important constituency is its own bureaucracy.”

Using corruption allegations to purge a high-ranking official is a time-honoured tradition for new presidents in China.

Both Mr Hu and Mr Jiang moved early in their terms to dispose of prominent rivals whom they accused of corruption and jailed, but neither of their targets was as formidable as Mr Zhou.

Using the term “tiger” to describe campaign targets also recurs throughout history.

During the civil war that brought the Communists to power, the retreating Nationalist leadership staged a brief “tiger hunt” in 1948 to stamp out corruption in the financial centre of Shanghai.

Even Mr Xi’s promise to go after tigers as well as flies is a direct quotation from Mao Zedong, who launched an anti-corruption campaign in the early 1950s to wipe out enemies and rivals.

But the length and severity of the current campaign has had more of an impact on behaviour than in the past, according to business people and officials, who say that conspicuous consumption is off the agenda these days.

Most global luxury companies have reported declining Chinese sales of their products, which have been favoured as gifts and bribes for officials for years.

In the past few weeks, producers of high-end spirits like Diageo, Pernod Ricard and Rémy Cointreau have reported double-digit first-half collapses in sales in China and have explicitly blamed Beijing’s austerity drive for their woes.