China faces a demon gangsters in government
REUTERS

SHENYANG, CHINA, JAN 21: The gangsters whoslashed open the face of prominent businesswoman Liu Yan, leaving scars like the stitched and puckered seam of a baseball, acted as though they owned this city.

And for much of the 1990s, it seemed, they did.

Liu unwisely crossed a property developer who was analleged organised crime boss. Others who tangled with the mob were Left with slashed Achilles tendons, broken spines, or simply dead.

Now, as officials wrap up an investigation into theunderworld of Shenyang, an astonishing picture has emerged of a city that looked like Al Capone's Chicago. From the mayor down, gangs are suspected to have infiltrated most parts of government.

Similar tales are leaking from other cities as China'sCommunist government confronts one of its gravest challenges in the form of mobsters who are often family members of senior officials, and even officials themselves.

"China has reached a turning point: mafia is intersectingwith government and officials and their relatives are the main players," said a Chinese former journalist following the case.

"I call it Feudal Fascism -- blood ties are everything andthe empowered class accumulates wealth," he said.

"Shenyang is a picture of low-profile cities across China."

PARTY MEMBERS AS MAFIA KINGPINS

In Shenyang, a northeastern city of 6.9 million people hitby unemployment and industrial collapse, authorities have arrested a 40-year-old businessman, Liu Yong, as a mafia kingpin.

A Communist Party member, he sat as a legislator in thecity's parliament.

It was his henchmen, according to state-run citynewspapers, who disfigured the businesswoman who refused to relocate her food company to make way for a real estate project. She is now chairwoman of a local hotel and declined to be interviewed.

Through a brother on the police force, Liu Yong employedofficers to torture his rivals and beat up shopkeepers who refused to surrender their property or tobacco wholesale businesses to him, the official Xinhua news agency said.

In his pocket, said city officials, were dozens of topadministrators and their relatives, including the deputy mayor and his wife, the Chief prosecutor and the wife of the mayor.

Mayor Mu Suixin has been dumped from office and statenewspapers said he, too, is suspected of ties to the mob.

As prosecutors unravel the web of corruption linkinggovernment, business and organised crime in Shenyang, many Chinese are wondering how far Beijing is prepared to go to expose similar scandals elsewhere in China, and at what point it could threaten the legitimacy of Communist rule.

Such cases are particularly damaging given how state mediapoint to rising organised crime in post-Soviet Russia as a stock argument against democratic reforms in China.

A lawyer close to the case suggests that the main reasonBeijing targetted Shenyang was the brazen violence and ostentatious displays of wealth from officials supposedly earning modest salaries.

Jobless residents penned furious letters to the PartyDiscipline Inspection Commission seeking to file suit against former Mayor Mu and his high-living wife, Jia Xiu'E, he said.

BULLETS OVER SHENYANG

Just two days before Mu's resignation was announcedpublicly last month, an apparently unrelated violent episode unfolded in the city that further illustrates gangster-and-government ties.

Pursued by police who wanted them for murder, two gunmenburst into the apartment of Wang Jiang, son of former Shenyang Mayor Wang Danbo, and held him hostage.

One gunman, Wang Qunchao, was also the son of a former cityadministrator and had been a childhood friend of his hostage.

Hundreds of police and bystanders gathered outside thebuilding that houses the swank two-floor apartment, and Wang Qunchao threw thousands of bank notes out the window in a desperate bid to incite chaos and make a getaway, media said.

When plice finally broke into the home the next day, thetwo Wangs were found dead with bullet holes in their heads. The other gunman was clinging to life with a slug in his own brain.

But the watershed case has been Liu Yong's, whose hottemper and thirst for blood terrorised the city for years.

His gangsters engaged rivals in gunfights at restaurantsand once thrashed a college administrator to within an inch of his life when Liu thought the man was tailing his car, Xinhua said.

He ordered his men to teach a lesson to an elderly fortuneteller whose prophesy rubbed him the wrong way, and they Left the man barely alive with his intestine spilling out, it said.

After he was finally apprehended attempting to flee toRussia last July, Liu told investigators he paid hefty bribes to Jia and the wife of Deputy Mayor Ma Xiangdong, who was arrested for gambling away the equivalent of $4.8 million in public funds during 17 trips to the island of Macau, city officials said.

Police confiscated Jia's passport last April when she triedto visit a daughter studying in the United States and then arrested her in October, they said.

Mayor Mu divorced her after she was implicated, but thedamage had already been done. The charismatic mayor, an accomplished acolyte of Premier Zhu Rongji, was ousted.

Liu Shi, the former procurator-general of the city and thegodfather of Liu Yong through his friendship with Liu Yong's father, a onetime court official, was also arrested.

And this month, Zhang Guoguang, the governor of Liaoningprovince, of which Shenyang is capital, was transferred to serve as governor of Hubei.

PARTY STABILITY TRUMPS DISCIPLINE

Property under Liu Yong's flagship firm, Jia Yang Group, isstill ubiquitious, including a huge supermarket at the glitziest corner of the city and office buildings along Central Avenue.

His ultimate project, the massive 82,000 square metre(881,500 square foot) Jia Yang Garden/Jia Yang Mall, remains unfinished, a hulking red brick shell rising several stories from the icy streets.

A Jia Yang Group employee said construction would continue,but new ownership had to be worked out.

"The building is practically completed," he said. "It seemsimpossible they would tear it down now."

Chinese leaders may be applying the same pragmatism totheir anti-corruption drive: remove corroded bricks, but not so many that it risks toppling the overall Party structure.

Flamboyant former Mayor Mu -- a chain-smoker now dying oflung cancer -- will, for one, probably be spared prosecution.

"They'll show him mercy," said Wang Xinmin, an engineer atthe China Association for Science and Technology who is representing a foreign businesswoman who blames corruption for lost investments in Shenyang.

"You can'T throw the book at every official suspected ofcorruption," Wang said. "China could never build enough prisons."

Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.