英國《金融時報》報道，中國前國家主席江澤民上月已向習近平「發出明確訊號」，要求他放慢反腐的腳步，意在警告習近平，不要對太多黨內高層動手。報道又指上任國家主席胡錦濤，亦對習的反腐行動有所保留，警告習「不要過份擴大反腐運動」。
《金融時報》昨日引述三名消息人士報道此消息。
據三位知情人士透露，2003年卸任國家主席的江澤民，上月向現任國家主席習近平發出了明確的信號。江澤民發出信息稱：這場反腐敗運動的步伐不能搞得太快。此言意在警告習近平，不要對黨內高層太多權貴家族或親信網動手。
（FT中文網）
現任中國國家主席習近平，接任黨總書記之位一年多以來高調反貪腐，提倡「老虎蒼蠅一起打」，至今已有23名省部級官員落馬，其雷厲風行的反腐手段贏得輿論讚賞。不過，落馬的官員中，有不少是前中央政治局常委周永康的「石油幫」、「四川幫」及政法派系心腹。被外界視為江澤民親信的周永康，本人亦已受查，但官方未正式公佈；一旦正式被起訴，周將會是中共執政60多年來，被起訴貪腐罪行的最高層官員。《金融時報》報道，江澤民及胡錦濤已同意對周的處理。
報道指，江、胡二人大體上支持習的反腐行動，但認為該行動範圍太廣，憂慮若調查進一步擴大，會傷及其派系的利益。外界盛傳習政府打算調查胡錦濤的「大秘書」令計劃。江、胡二人亦擔心，持續的反腐行動，將動搖黨內支持，威脅中共統治。
江澤民叫習近平停嚴打周永康 評論員指中共難以貫徹反貪腐
英國《金融時報》報道，內地當局嚴打前中央政治局常委委員周永康的貪污事件，已經觸動前國家主席江澤民的神經，並要求有關方面放輕腳步。
據三位知情人士透露，2003年卸任國家主席的江澤民，上月向現任國家主席習近平發出了這個訊息，表示「這場反腐敗運動的步伐不能搞得太快」，藉此敕令習近平，不要對他的親信過份絕情。這項舉動亦引起前國家主席胡錦濤的關注，認為這會打擊共產黨內部的信心與士氣。
無疑，這兩位前國家主席認為這場的反貪腐運動已經「過了火位」，如果再持續下去，勢將損害到自己或自己所屬派別的利益，更甚者，或會令到整個中共人心惶惶，威脅到中共統治的穩定。
現時習近平的反貪腐運動是中國數十年來最龐大的，他上任時已經將「對付腐敗」與「鋪張浪費」列為自己任期內的主要任務，指出要「老虎蒼蠅一起打」，起肅貪倡廉之餘，亦能鞏固自己的勢力。
由是之故，去年屬於江澤民親信的周永康集團被一網打盡後，一直令中共高層內部議論紛紛；周永康一旦被公審，那麼將會是中共建國以來被指控貪污最嚴重的最高級官員。而外界亦有盛傳，當局有意調查中央統戰部部長令計劃的「奢華生活」，令胡錦濤尤其不安。
中國問題專家林和立向本報表示，中共退休常委一般分成兩派：一派主張嚴打周永康；另一派則主張用黨紀懲處，避免公審。反對公審主要是「上海幫」，包括江澤民與前國家副主席曾慶紅；而據他所知，胡錦濤是希望打擊周永康的，因為周永康與江澤民較親近，屬於不同黨派，所以可藉此削弱對方勢力。然而當年習近平由江澤民與曾慶紅一手提攜，習近平仍然要感恩圖報，現時他還未對周永康有進一步行動，顯示他仍然不能決定解決的方法。林和立預料，只要江澤民一日健在，習近平「反貪腐」時遇到的制肘仍然會非常多。
Ex-president Jiang urges Beijing to curb anti-corruption drive
By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing and Simon Rabinovitch in Shanghai
March 31, 2014
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 2012that 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” in1948 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.
Captured in a Chinese tiger hunt
By Jamil Anderlini and Lucy Hornby
March 31, 2014
The demise of one of China’s most powerful men has as much to do with politics as with graft
If convicted, Zhou Yongkang would be the mostsenior official found guilty of corruption since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949
“When a man becomes a high official, even his chickens and dogs go to heaven.”
At the start of 2012, Zhou Yongkangwas arguably the most powerful man in China. He controlled the country’s vast domestic security apparatus, with a budget of $100bn that exceeded spending on national defence. So deep were his political, energy and security ties that he was sometimes described as the Dick Cheney of China. And his trove of compromising secret files on influential people drew comparisons to another American: J Edgar Hoover.
As one of the nine-man standing committee of the politburo of the Communist party that in effect rules China, he was untouchable and all-powerful. His patronage network extended throughout the sprawling Chinese bureaucracy.
But this all changed last year when Mr Zhou(pronounced Joe) and many of his family members were detained by Communist party investigators. Details of their alleged corruption should be made public in the coming weeks, say people familiar with the investigations. Mr Zhou and his relatives are being held in the kind of secret prison that security agents under his control sent people regarded as a threat to the party.
If Mr Zhou, 71, goes on trial and is convicted, he will be the most senior official to be found guilty of corruption since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Mr Zhou’s corruption case has sent shockwaves throughout business and government bureaucracies. Since he formally stepped down a year ago, hundreds of officials and businessmen who owed their glittering careers to his ascent – including minister-level bureaucrats from the security services, state oil companies and the state asset administrator –have been detained on corruption charges.
The decision to purge him publicly will probably provide the climax for an anti-corruption campaign that has been the signature policy of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, since he came to power more than a year ago.
Most observers assume Mr Zhou’s detention is as much the result of an elite power struggle as a desire to crack down on corruption. Mr Xi needs a scalp to show people he is in control and serious about tackling corruption. By purging Mr Zhou he also gets rid of a potential rival.
But the purge of Mr Zhou also exposes the biggest obstacle the authoritarian system faces as it seeks to cleanse itself of graft: the sheer size of informal power structures such as his.
Even if Mr Xi is intent on removing the rot at the top of the system, he cannot attack other senior leaders and their patronage networks because doing so would destabilise the entire Chinese power structure.
Tigers and flies
While Mr Xi has vowed to catch high-ranking“tigers” as well as lowly “flies”, the tens of thousands of officials who have been detained over the past year mostly count as flies.
“For the current leadership, taking down Mr Zhou in a tiger hunt will help them get rid of political opponents and solidify their political reputation,” says Zhang Lifan, a historian and political commentator. “But it will also expose the problems of the system. Will the general public be content with Zhou’s removal only or will they also ask questions about other senior officials?”
The tiger hunt is a hallowed tradition in the cut-throat world of Chinese politics. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Mr Xi’s predecessors, both waited until they had been in power for at least two years before they purged a powerful adversary: Chen Xitong, Beijing’s party boss in the mid-1990s in Mr Jiang’s case and Chen Liangyu, Shanghai’s boss, in Mr Hu’s.
Mr Xi has moved much faster, and aimed much higher, by targeting Mr Zhou. Somewhat paradoxically, if Mr Xi does decide to put Mr Zhou on trial, it would suggest he still feels the need for a show of strength and that his grip on the nation may not be as strong as many believe.
The political risks of publicly purging Mr Zhou are heightened by the fact his allegedly corrupt patronage networks are mirrored in the careers of almost every other senior Chinese leader of the past three decades.
“Xi’s institutional power is strong but his power base is relatively weak,” says Bo Zhiyue from the National University of Singapore’s East Asia Institute. “Even if he knocks out everyone he cannot be strong because his power base is quite shallow.”
When he was selected as president-in-waiting in 2008, Mr Xi was considered a compromise candidate because he was acceptable to most large factions within the party.
He is the first president since the early1980s not to be handpicked for the job by Deng Xiaoping, the former paramount leader, whose support bestowed enormous legitimacy on presidents Jiang and Hu.
Although he is the “princeling” son of a top party leader, Mr Xi’s own support network is not as extensive or as established as those of many other leaders, including Mr Zhou.
Humble origins
Mr Zhou’s long rise to the pinnacle of power began in a small village on the banks of the Yangtze River, where he was born into a peasant household in 1942.
He left the village at 15 and eventually graduated from the Beijing Petroleum Institute, launching his career in China’s energy sector. At school in the capital he changed his name from the provincial-sounding “Zhou Yuangen” to what he uses now.
Powerful patron: Zeng Qinghong, formervice-president
His two younger brothers were given the family house instead of an education. But they still reaped the benefits as their brother worked his way up through the party ranks.
At the entrance to tiny Xiqiantou village, a huge, modern compound surrounded by high whitewashed walls stands on the spot where the humble Zhou home once was.
Neighbours of the Zhou clan say the compound was built with government funds by local party officials who would visit the family to pai ma pi, or “pat the horse’s bottom” – a popular term for sycophancy.
“Every holiday or festival there were always lots of expensive cars outside the Zhou house and senior provincial and city officials all came to pai ma pi,” said one villager who used to play with Mr Zhou and his brothers as a child. “Can you imagine? These uneducated peasants with all those powerful officials sucking up to them and bringing them gifts.”
During 30 years of working in the oil industry Mr Zhou built up a powerful network of patrons and clients, as well as a deep understanding of the intersection between power, money and national security.
By 1996, when he was named head of China National Petroleum Corp, he was already on the fast track to the Communist party’s inner circle of absolute power.
Although he rarely returned to his ancestral village, Mr Zhou made sure his family prospered. One of his brothers became the local deputy director for the Ministry of Land and Resources, a lucrative post for allocating land and mining rights. His sister-in-law established the only local dealership to sell and service Audis, the car of choice for Chinese officials.
According to villagers, a government plan in1996 to demolish the entire village to make way for an “economic development zone” was suddenly halted when officials realised whose family graves they planned to bulldoze.
With the backing of Zeng Qinghong, former Chinese vice-president, his most powerful patron from the oil industry, Mr Zhou served as minister of land and resources, party boss of Sichuan province, and minister of public security in quick succession between 1999 and 2007.
That year he made it to the top of the party,when he was named to the Politburo Standing Committee.
He was handed the justice and law portfolio,giving him control over the courts, police and paramilitary. During the next several years Mr Zhou’s power increased exponentially as government spending on“stability maintenance” ballooned.
The Bo factor
Mr Zhou’s detention is intimately tied to the downfall of Bo Xilai, whose high-flying political career was ruined when his wife was found to have murdered a British businessman. Bo was detained in March 2012 and sentenced to life in prison last year for corruption and abuse of power.
Although there was no mention of it during his trial, Bo is suspected of having plotted with Mr Zhou to sideline Mr Xi and take his position as president of China, according to several people with ties to senior leaders.
Not long after Bo was arrested, Mr Zhou was relieved of day-to-day operational control of the security apparatus, as first reported byThe Financial Times in May 2012. Within months, several of his protégés were being investigated for alleged corruption.
Since then Communist party investigators have detained hundreds of officials who owed their rapid advancement to their links with Mr Zhou. The long list of detainees connected to Mr Zhou offers an insight into how personal networks pervade the bureaucracy and how attachment to a powerful patron is the surest way to move up through the ranks.
Introductory service
In the formerly all-powerful state security apparatus, hundreds of spies and policemen have been purged in the past year,including the head of state security for Beijing, a Zhou protégé.
Purged: Li Dongsheng, former vice-minister of propaganda
Another casualty is Li Dongsheng, 58, who spent 22 years at China Central Television, the state broadcaster, where he rose to be deputy station chief and eventually China’s vice-minister of propaganda.
According to people familiar with his role at the station, in addition to his day job Mr Li regularly introduced senior party leaders to attractive young female reporters and anchors from the station.
These introductions included one he made between Mr Zhou and his second wife, a former CCTV anchor who is 28 years his junior. Mr Zhou’s first wife died in a car crash.
Despite having no experience in law enforcement, Mr Li was named to the influential position of deputy public security minister in 2009, two years after Mr Zhou took control of the domestic security portfolio.
At least 100 officials with ties to Mr Zhou in Sichuan have been detained, along with a dozen top executives at CNPC and its subsidiaries, among them Jiang Jiemin, its former chairman.
Demise of a dynasty
The business activities of Zhou Bin, Mr Zhou’s 42-year-old son, provide a striking example of how relatives of the powerful are able to use their connections to skim off profits from a wide range of state-owned ventures.
The younger Zhou’s empire covered everything from television production to mining, energy services, equipment for Chinese oilfields in Iraq, state-run affordable housing projects and even a plan to overcharge migrant workers for compulsory surgical procedures.
In several business and personal disputes,Zhou Bin threatened to retaliate against his adversaries using the formal police and state security apparatus under the control of his father, according to people involved in those disputes.
The younger Zhou was detained last year while Zhou Yongkang and his wife were placed under house arrest in Beijing in November.
According to a memo circulating among Beijing officials, investigators have so far seized almost Rmb100bn ($16bn) worth of assets from Mr Zhou, his family and associates.
The haul includes guns, fine art, armour-plated cars, hundreds of apartments, millions of dollars in cash and foreign currency, gold bullion and equity stakes in hundreds of companies,according to the memo.
Similar messages about previous corruption investigations have circulated widely among officials in the past and have sometimes proved to be just rumours. Several people who received this latest message said they believed it was being circulated by the authorities to lay the ground for an announcement on Mr Zhou’s fate.
Evening raid
At 7pm on December 1, a dozen plainclothes party “discipline and inspection” officers raided the apartment of Zhou Yuanqing, Zhou Yongkang’s youngest brother, in the city of Wuxi, about 40minutes’ drive from their ancestral village.
The investigators stayed until 5am, according to witnesses, and when they left they took Zhou Yuanqing and Zhou Lingying, his wife, with them. At about the same time, back in Xiqiantou village, the corruption investigators arrived to find Zhou Yuanxing, 69, Mr Zhou’s other brother, dying from bone cancer.
When his funeral was held in the village on February 12 only about 50 relatives attended.
His brothers and nephew were not there and nor were any representatives from the government.
“Those high-ranking officials used to line up to bring gifts and ask for favours from the Zhou family,” said one neighbour in the village as he washed vegetables for his dinner. “Now that Zhou Yongkang has been brought down in a power struggle they have all disappeared.”