Michael Sheridan
The Times
June 7, 2015
Zeng Qinghong (C) with then President Hu Jintao (R) and Premier Wen Jiabao (L) at the Great Hall of the People in 2007. Source: AFP
He was once the kingmaker of Chinese politics, but Zeng Qinghong is said to be among the victims of a purge that is sweeping away the last liberals in the country’s Communist elite.
Zeng, 75, cut a smooth figure in the top ranks of the party and served as a trusted aide to the former leader Jiang Zemin.
A supporter of democratic experiments inside the party, he shocked orthodox cadres by banning performances of The Internationale, the Marxist anthem.
He went on to broker the deal that led to Xi Jinping taking over as head of the party, the state and the army in 2012.
But Zeng is now under detention in the northeast city of Tianjin, while Xi’s investigators probe his family’s affairs for evidence of corruption, according to media reports in Hong Kong.
It is a sign that the party’s factions have decisively broken their unwritten pact to leave each other’s family business dealings alone in the interests of unity.
The move may be intended to curb the influence of Jiang, 88, who continues as a power in the land a decade after he stepped down as leader.
Zeng belonged to the aristocracy of Red China — his father was Mao Tse-tung’s interior minister and his mother made the 1930s Long March — but that does not guarantee immunity from the poisonous elite politics in Beijing.
The purge, officially described as a campaign against graft, has already claimed hundreds of officials and army officers, including two generals close to Zeng, as well as the former security supremo, Zhou Yongkang.
The targets of the investigations, conducted by the party’s Central Discipline and Inspection Commission (CDIC) under draconian extrajudicial rules known as shuanggui, are almost all rivals of Xi.
Some, like the fallen spy chief, were hardliners. Now it seems that as Xi concentrates his authority, anyone in favour of a collective leadership or mild political reform is in trouble.
The first clue that Zeng might have been vulnerable came in a strange article posted on the CDIC website on February 25. It purported to be about a figure from imperial history, Prince Qing Yikuang.
The prince grew rich from his role at the court of the Dowager Empress Cixi and is said to have put his ill-gotten gains into the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the forerunner of today’s (Sunday) HSBC.
Netizens swiftly noted the Chinese characters of the prince’s name were similar to Zeng’s. They speculated the article meant to compare the empress to his patron, the former leader Jiang, while hinting at a heady mix of graft and foreign finance.
Zeng may be vulnerable because his family is seen to personify the excesses of the generation known as “princelings”.
Last week, an Australian newspaper highlighted the extraordinary wealth of his son, Zeng Wei, who bought a 100-year-old Sydney waterfront mansion for more than pounds 15m, demolished it and built a stunning new house on the site. In a telling signal, censors allowed the story to be reproduced on websites in China.
In an article for The Wall Street Journal, the China scholar David Shambaugh says all the tentative reforms masterminded by Zeng have been rolled back. Shambaugh said China’s earlier leaders had sought to manage change, not resist it.
“But Xi wants none of this,” he concluded.
