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C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 SHENYANG 000134 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 09/26/2028 
TAGS: PGOV PHUM SOCI ECON CH
SUBJECT: NORTHEAST CHINA: CORRUPTION SCANDALS SNARE JUDGES, 
 SENIOR OFFICIALS AND POLICE, BUT TO WHAT EFFECT? 
 
Classified By: CONSUL GENERAL STEPHEN B. WICKMAN. 
REASONS: 1.4(b)/(d). 
 
¶1. (C) SUMMARY: Corruption scandals in northeast China over 
the past year have reached levels in seniority unseen for 
several years.  Jilin Province quietly sacked ten of its 
High Court judges, but legal contacts say the Party 
prevented a thorough investigation.  Attorneys report that 
judicial corruption in northeast China remains endemic. 
Major cases in Jilin have also claimed its highest-level 
official in thirty years and two former chiefs of state- 
owned enterprises, while in Liaoning, corruption 
prosecutions have netted high-level police officials and 
the province's food-safety chief.  A concerted effort to 
combat the region's corrosive official corruption does not 
seem to be at work; prosecutions seem ad hoc instead of 
systematic.  Domestic reporting on the cases largely has 
been absent or orchestrated to limit local citizens' 
exposure to events.  Northeastern Chinese of all stripes 
bemoan official corruption as a fact of life here.  END 
SUMMARY. 
 
¶2. (C) Officials in northeast China have long struggled to 
overcome the stigma of past corruption cases--one of the 
juiciest resulted in the execution of a Shenyang vice 
mayor--but, try as they might, prosecutions are reaching 
levels in seniority unseen for several years.  Hardest hit 
has been Jilin Province, where a trickle of prosecutions 
over the year claimed ten of the province's most senior 
judges, as well as high-level former officials and the 
former chief of one of its premier state-owned enterprises 
(SOEs). 
 
THE JUDICIARY: JILIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICES SACKED 
--------------------------------------------- ----- 
 
¶3. (C) Most intriguing, and unreported in the PRC press, 
was the quiet sacking of at least ten corrupt justices on 
the Jilin High People's Court.  Our contacts in Jilin 
Province legal circles say the arrests occurred sometime in 
late 2007.  Details remain hazy, but according to Professor 
HE Zhipeng (PROTECT) of Jilin University's School of Law, 
one of the PRC's top law schools and alma mater of most of 
the judges implicated, one version has it that flags were 
raised when authorities discovered commercial property 
being titled to a High People's Court clerk.  Subsequent 
investigations traced the property transfers to a number of 
justices accepting bribes from claimants, in some cases 
from both sides simultaneously.  Using the clerk to 
coordinate, judges had been instructing claimants to engage 
the services of particular attorneys who would, in turn, 
funnel money to the judges through the clerk in exchange 
for a favorable ruling, said Professor He.  Another version 
of the affair holds that authorities latched onto the 
corrupt clerk after the family of one aggrieved claimant 
approached police for revenge on a judge whom he had paid 
off. 
 
¶4. (C) Punishments for the judges implicated in the affair 
varied.  Several were stripped of their posts and Party 
membership, while as many as six received prison sentences 
of up to ten years, which they are now serving, said 
Professor He.  (NOTE: In an effort to clean things up, the 
Dean of Jilin University's School of Law, ZHANG Wenxian, 
was elevated this year to head the court, according to his 
successor, XU Weidong (PROTECT), who told our Jilin 
University contacts the general contours of the case.  Our 
contacts told us Zhang is a respected figure who has earned 
acclaim for transforming Jilin University's law school 
during his tenure. END NOTE.)  Notable in the investigation 
phase of the affair is the leading role of the Party's 
Discipline Inspection Commission, which had the proverbial 
"first cut" at the judges because, as our Jilin University 
contacts pointed out, nearly all were Party members.  He 
Zhipeng said that the prosecutors were instructed-- 
presumably by Party officials--to limit the number of 
judges investigated; our contacts assessed this was a sign 
that more of the many additional justices on the High Court 
may have been implicated in some way. 
 
¶5. (C) Judicial corruption throughout northeast China 
remains a serious problem, according to legal contacts in 
Liaoning and Jilin provinces.  Professor He linked the 
blight to judges' meager salaries.  Judges in Jilin, for 
instance, earn roughly RMB 2000 (USD 300) per month, he 
noted.  (NOTE: By comparison, average mid-level managers at 
major Jilin firms earn up to RMB 16500 (USD 2400) per 
month. END NOTE.)  Also to blame is the Chinese legal 
system's absence of prohibitions on ex parte communication 
between judges and attorneys/claimants, which Professor He 
 
SHENYANG 00000134  002 OF 003 
 
 
said was common in northeast China.  As for Liaoning, 
Dalian attorney and current IVLP grantee ZHAI Yuzhong 
(PROTECT), told us that judicial corruption remains endemic 
in the province.  It is common, for example, for Liaoning 
attorneys to "play mahjong" with judges, purposely losing 
large sums of money in order to influence the arbiters of 
their cases, according to Zhai.  Professor He Zhipeng told 
us the practice is common in Jilin as well.  That said, 
Dean Xu Weidong noted that judicial corruption of the sort 
exposed at the Jilin High Court currently tends to be more 
of a problem at the local trial-court level than at the 
high-court level because there is less oversight. 
 
THE EXECUTIVE: ARREST OF HIGHEST JILIN OFFICIAL SINCE '78 
--------------------------------------------- ------------ 
 
¶6. (C) Corruption charges in another case this year also 
implicated Jilin Province's highest-level official since 
¶1978.  Central authorities in April reportedly whisked away 
MI Fengjun--Party Secretary of provincial capital Changchun 
from 1995-2001 and a deputy chair of the Jilin People's 
Congress until 2008--to Beijing on suspicion of serious 
bribery and corruption, according to Caijing magazine.  Mi 
apparently still has yet to be removed from his position as 
a National People's Congress (NPC) delegate.  Current 
Changchun Party Secretary GAO Guangbin (PROTECT), a 
promising young up-and-comer with a Communist Youth League 
pedigree, told us recently that Mi's case is still under 
investigation.  Emphasizing that he was now removed from Mi 
by several predecessors in the position, Gao claimed the 
case has had little impact on Jilin officialdom.  He called 
Mi a "capable" politician, but ascribed his downfall to 
"individual" shortcomings.  Others have suggested more 
institutional factors are at work.  In June, for instance, 
Caijing magazine pointed to the corrosive force of 
localism: many senior Jilin officials are still drawn from 
within the province, allowing them to accumulate sufficient 
power to fend off investigations into their (ab)use of 
power. 
 
¶7. (SBU) Mi's downfall preceded that of another prominent 
Jilin official.  PRC media announced in July this year that 
TIAN Zhong, Deputy Party Secretary of Changchun between 
1998 and 2006, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for 
bribery and embezzlement involving millions of dollars over 
nearly a decade.  It appears that Tian's testimony laid the 
groundwork for Mi Fengjun's (imminent) prosecution.  Tian's 
sentencing came several months after a series of more minor 
corruption-related busts elsewhere in the province, like 
that of Jilin City's Vice Mayor YU Guohua, whom authorities 
announced earlier in the year had been sacked for accepting 
millions of renminbi in bribes from business interests. 
 
THE SOEs: TWO FORMER CHIEFS ARRESTED 
------------------------------------ 
 
¶8. (C) The former chiefs of two major Jilin-based SOEs have 
also been implicated in corruption scandals.  Police in 
March reportedly detained LIU Xianlu, the former chairman 
of heavyweight Jilin Grain Group, on suspicion of 
embezzlement and bribery involving over ten million 
dollars, again according to the hard-hitting Caijing 
magazine.  Liu was an NPC delegate for five years until 
March 2008.  Contacts at the group--the PRC's largest 
grain-trading firm, which handles over sixty percent of the 
country's global grain transactions--told us Liu's abuse of 
power was a product of the "old system" at the firm.  Prior 
to internal reforms there in 2003-2004, the firm's lack of 
transparency and management controls offered Liu too much 
room to maneuver.  This explanation may be incomplete, 
however.  Some overseas press reporting, for instance, has 
suggested that former high-level political officials may 
also have been implicated in Liu's misdeeds, though we have 
been unable to confirm this. 
 
¶9. (SBU) In December 2007, several months before Liu's 
detention, Jilin authorities in another major case 
sentenced to death the former chairman of Northeast 
Expressway for corruption involving millions of dollars he 
defrauded from shareholders.  The case is thought to be 
linked to an even larger Heilongjiang-based corruption 
scandal that broke in 2004. 
 
THE POLICE: TOP COPS SHELTERING CRIMINAL GANGS 
--------------------------------------------- - 
 
¶10. (SBU) South of Jilin, recent months have also seen the 
(partial) conclusion of a major police scandal in Liaoning 
Province that recalled a massive 2001 corruption bombshell 
involving official collusion with criminal elements that 
 
SHENYANG 00000134  003 OF 003 
 
 
eventually implicated over 100 Shenyang officials, 
including the mayor, vice mayor, and senior judges. 
Liaoning authorities in June tried ZHANG Jianming, the 
former Deputy Director of the Shenyang Public Security 
Bureau (PSB), on charges of bribery and protecting a major 
Liaoning criminal syndicate for over a decade.  His trial 
was conducted in a stadium because Zhang, who before his 
arrest was once considered an anti-crime "hero," was 
accompanied by so many other defendants.  By July, Liaoning 
Province had prosecuted at least eleven police officers, 
including Zhang, for sheltering three mafia groups in 
Liaoning Province, according to official media.  Police 
charged included heads of anti-narcotics units, though the 
Shenyang rumor mill has it that the city's narcotic squads 
are still in league with criminal drug traffickers.  Zhang 
Jianming was found guilty, but details of his sentence 
remain unknown. 
 
¶11. (U) Zhang's downfall appears to be among Liaoning 
Province's most prominent corruption cases since that of 
Zhang Shusen in 2007.  Zhang, the former chief of the 
province's Food and Drug Administration, was sentenced in 
October to 15 years in prison for embezzlement and 
accepting bribes from pharmaceutical companies 
manufacturing substandard products, among others. 
 
IMPLICATIONS 
------------ 
 
¶12. (C) Northeast China appears to be witnessing some of 
its highest-level corruption prosecutions since 2004-2005, 
when a massive government post-selling scandal in 
Heilongjiang Province triggered the downfall of over 400 
officials, including former governor Tian Fengshan, 
provincial Organization Department chief Han Guizhi, and a 
number of judges.  Many northeasterners today, however, 
remain cynical or in the dark.  Events over the past year 
do not suggest a concerted effort to combat the region's 
corrosive corruption in many areas of official life. 
Investigations and prosecutions seem to be ad hoc instead 
of concertedly systematic.  Domestic reporting within 
northeast China on many of the cases has been either 
deliberately downplayed or entirely absent, as in the case 
of Jilin's High Court judges.  In many instances, the most 
detailed domestic reporting has been "cross-regional" in 
nature, carried out by, and only appearing in, non- 
northeastern Chinese news sources, thereby limiting the 
local public's exposure to events.  Northeastern Chinese 
businessmen, lawyers, journalists, academics and ordinary 
citizens still tell us that official corruption remains 
widespread in the region, a fact of life in everything from 
securing schooling for their children to obtaining 
approvals for construction projects. 
 
¶13. (C) Worth watching in the period ahead will be the 
impact of the Jilin cases on the fortunes of provincial 
Party Secretary Wang Min and Governor Han Changfu.  Both 
are out-of-towners who were brought into northeast China by 
Beijing with a mandate to, among other things, clean up the 
province. 
SWICKMAN