A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (36 page)

Coincidentally, the
New York Times
article was released on the day the Chinese state media announced that Chinese lawmakers had stripped Bo of his position as a delegate to the National People’s Congress at a bimonthly session, thus removing Bo’s immunity from prosecution. Twenty minutes before midnight, Xinhua issued another news report that the country’s highest prosecution organ had “decided to put Bo Xilai under investigation for alleged criminal offenses, as well as impose coercive measures on him in accordance with the law.”

The timings of these two events led to claims that Bo Xilai supporters and other conservatives had supplied the newspaper with negative and false information to retaliate against Premier Wen for bringing Bo down. Back in February 2012, two weeks after Wang Lijun’s attempted defection, a party insider alleged that Bo Xilai had hired several Chinese journalists and scholars to dig up dirt on Wen’s wife and son. A large-scale media attack against Wen had been planned in early 2012 to embarrass Wen and weaken his ability to influence his replacement on the State Council. In an Internet article posted on October 23, the anonymous author, who had apparently learned about the pending
New York Times
article after the newspaper contacted the Chinese government for comments, stated again that more than ten English- and Chinese-language media outlets, including mine, had received stacks of documents relating to Wen’s family in October. “Party conservatives had meticulously organized this despicable smear campaign through foreign media for quite some time to discredit the country’s righteous premier and even the president elect,” said the anonymous author. “The documents included hundreds of pages of company reports and internal memos. Without the help of party insiders, it would not be possible to obtain such confidential material.”

In addition, the article said the documents contained false evidence and speculative statements to mislead the media. In the case of Premier Wen Jiabao, the anonymous author pointed out that the conspirators
deliberately attributed other people’s assets to Wen’s family members to sensationalize the impact.

Because David Barboza adopted a Chinese name, Zhang Dawei, during his tenure in China, a blogger searched the Internet and found several online articles with the byline Zhang Dawei about Bo Xilai’s accomplishments in Chongqing. The blogger quickly concluded that David Barboza, aka Zhang Dawei, had been wined and dined by Bo Xilai in Chongqing, and that the facts in his articles should be called into question. A few hours later, other bloggers indicated that it was a mistaken identity and Barboza had never visited Chongqing.

After reading the anonymous writer’s online posting, I contacted several overseas media outlets. None had received “stacks of documents” about Wen Jiabao. During an e-mail exchange in December 2012, Barboza also vehemently denied obtaining any information from party insiders. He said he had started working on the story a year before and his information had come from public records. In addition, he stated in his blog, “Not only were there no leaked documents, I never in the course of reporting met anyone who offered or hinted that they had documents related to the family holdings. This was a paper trail of publicly available documents that I followed with my own reporting, and if I might hazard a guess, it was a trail that no one else had followed before me.”

I also disputed the rumor through an editorial on
Mingjing News
. “The important issue is whether the
Times
has presented the facts accurately and fairly,” I wrote. “From the article, we can see that the
Times
has conducted meticulous research and provided a balanced report. The paper offered opportunities for the Chinese government and Premier Wen to respond and comment on the story, but no one did.”

Even so, some political analysts and the Chinese public remain unconvinced. One analyst charged that the
New York Times
had degraded itself by becoming a tool of China’s power struggles. Gao Xin, author of
The Biography of Premier Wen Jiabao
, argued during an interview in Chinese on Radio France International:

       
I cannot vouch that Wen Jiabao’s family members are innocent. However, if we look around, we’ll see that the families of the majority
of the senior Chinese leaders are in business. Why was Wen Jiabao, who is retiring in 2013, singled out? It is simple. By repeatedly advocating democratic reforms, he made many party senior leaders and elders nervous about their future. At the same time, Wen’s high-profile role in the anti-Bo campaign made him the number-one enemy among Bo supporters. Both groups want to destroy his legacy and credibility, making it harder for his successor to continue his liberal policies. Wen has become a vulnerable victim in a new round of power struggle.

However, political analysts acknowledged that there had been persistent rumors about Wen’s family finances since 2010 and the volume of such noises started to pick up after Wen had taken on a prominent role in the Bo case. Chen Xiaoping, a US-based scholar, noted:

       
Since Bo’s dismissal, Wen gave several high-profile talks about the party’s anticorruption efforts, calling for the implementation of laws that require officials to declare their assets. It is natural that Wen’s family finances drew greater media scrutiny. Insiders might have leaked some news tips to the overseas Chinese media. When Western reporters captured the leads, they started to conduct their own independent research. This thoroughly investigated story in the
New York Times
has put Wen in a politically precarious position, hitting home the message that Bo Xilai was not the only senior official tainted with corruption scandals. Those who threw him out, including the seemingly most pro-people premier, are equally guilty.

KNOWN FOR HIS compassionate and unassuming personality, the seventy-one-year-old Wen Jiabao was seen by the public as an affable, scholarly official who quoted ancient classics in his speeches and understood the needs of ordinary people. He was not a member of the princeling group. Wen mentioned many times in his talks his humble origins: he grew up in an ordinary family in the northern city of Tianjin, his parents were schoolteachers, and they had a hard life when he was young. Journalists addressed him fondly as “Grandpa Wen.” On
Chinese New Year’s Day, a time of family reunion, Wen would either celebrate the holidays with a family in the remote rural areas in the country’s far northwest or eat dumplings with coal miners, deep underground in central China. He shed tears and bowed to the families of victims during a mining accident, and held the hands of an AIDS patient in a village devastated by the epidemic due to government denial and inaction. For years, people noticed him wearing the same worn-out down jacket and a pair of broken sneakers during his visits to factories and villages.

Wen Jiabao began his career as a geologist and then was an administrator in the northwestern province of Gansu. After he was transferred to the Ministry of Geology in Beijing in the early 1980s, his connections with the reform-minded party general secretary, Hu Yaobang, helped him rise to chief of the General Affairs Office of the Central Party Committee, which oversaw the day-to-day operations of senior party leaders. He survived the purge of Hu Yaobang in 1988 and continued to serve in that position until Hu Yaobang’s successor, Zhao Ziyang, took over.

In 1989, when a million protesters occupied Tiananmen Square, the then party general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, who aimed to take advantage of the anticorruption movement to advance his reform agenda, instructed Wen to send a telegram to Wan Li, head of the National People’s Congress who was visiting the US. Zhao had hoped to team up with Wan Li and stop the conservative faction from imposing martial law. Wen never sent the telegram. Instead, he reported Zhao to the Politburo Standing Committee. Zhao was eventually overthrown by veteran revolutionaries and put under house arrest. On the day of Zhao’s departure, Wen accompanied him on his visit to Tiananmen Square, where he delivered a tearful farewell speech. In the aftermath of what has come to be known as the Tiananmen Massacre, Wen emerged unscathed—his critics called him an opportunist—and went on to serve the next party general secretary, Jiang Zemin. In 2003, with the help of Jiang and the retiring premier Zhu Rongji, Wen ascended to the premier’s post.

Wen came to power at a time when China was facing serious social problems during its unprecedented economic boom. In the 1990s,
party leaders had pinned their hopes on high economic growth, believing that a robust economy would justify the legitimacy of the Communist Party. As a consequence, the party’s lopsided economic policy led to the overuse of natural resources and deterioration of the environment. In addition, government figures showed that China’s industrial growth centered mostly in the coastal provinces and cities. The vast inland region—71 percent of China’s total area and home to 30 percent of its population—accounted for just 17 percent of GDP in 2003. Growth on the coast and continued stagnation in the interior meant that development and income gaps between urban and rural areas, and between the wealthy and the poor, widened dramatically.

Globally, many economists use the Gini index to measure the degree of equality with respect to distribution of assets or income. The value index ranges from zero to one—zero expressing total equality and one for maximum inequality. China’s Gini index in 2003 was 0.47, way above that of its neighbor Japan (0.24) and the US (0.4). It was ironic that workers and peasants, who helped underwrite the Communist revolution and were called by Mao Zedong “masters of the country,” had dropped to the bottom rung of society. The party, which held itself up as champion of the workers and peasants, was under pressure.

To address the disparity in development and income distribution, Wen, along with President Hu Jintao, adopted a series of pro-people policies, such as abolishing agricultural tax in 2005, establishing social security systems, and promulgating rules to protect small and medium-size private enterprises. These policies proved to be ineffective and the urban–rural gap further deteriorated. In the face of widespread social discontent, Wen and Hu stepped up high-profile campaigns against corruption, which Wen believed had gravely undermined the people’s trust in the party. In 2003, the party’s anti-corruption bodies launched extensive investigations, putting more than 3,000 government officials behind bars on corruption-related charges. Wen also attempted to push for regulations that would require senior government leaders to divulge family finances. The move encountered strong resistance and was never implemented.

In his second five-year term, as President Hu launched measures to support failing state enterprises to prop up the economy, along with
brutal suppression of dissent to maintain social stability, Wen started to slip away from the party line in favor of bold liberal rhetoric on democratic reforms. He frequently gave press conferences to foreign media, impressing reporters with his straightforward answers on previously politically sensitive topics. At the end of the National People’s Congress in 2010, when a French journalist asked Wen about an article he had published in a government magazine regarding democracy in China, Wen replied:

       
A core value of socialist democracy is to let people be the real masters. This means that we need to guarantee people’s rights to elect their own officials, participate in decision-making, and manage and supervise the government. This means we have to create conditions for people to criticize and supervise the government and offer people the opportunities for them to fully develop and utilize creative and independent thinking.

At the 2012 National People’s Congress, Wen mentioned the word “reform” seventy times. He said that China must “press ahead with both economic structural reforms and political structural reforms, in particular reforms of the leadership system of the party and the country.”

Chinese dissident writer Yu Jie, who had left China after he was detained and repeatedly beaten by police for his writings, called Wen the “King of Showbiz” in a recent book. Yu charged that Wen’s prodemocracy rhetoric was insincere and empty, and that his many shows of visiting poor families in his old down jacket were purely publicity stunts for the Chinese media. Yu Jie was one of the first writers to reveal that Wen’s wife and son had built a vast business empire with their political connections. He charged that Wen had no intention of promoting political reforms, which could jeopardize his own family economic interest.

Wen was also criticized for his dual-faced role in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people. Among those killed were 5,335 schoolchildren. A few hours after the earthquake, Premier Wen Jiabao appeared. Despite his own injuries from the
debris, he spent days and nights commanding the rescue efforts and tearfully consoling survivors. The unprecedented disaster and the immediate response by the government ignited an unprecedented display of concern. Within days of the earthquake, the public rallied to offer donations and many traveled to Sichuan to help with the excavation. The government granted unprecedented freedom for journalists to cover the disaster, which effectively prevented rumor and speculation that could cause chaos.

However, the unity and positive energy generated by the earthquake relief efforts did not last long. Soon, officials resumed their normal corrupt and bureaucratic practices. Control over the media returned. Many heartbroken parents who had lost their children gathered to urge local officials to investigate the shoddy construction of school buildings. When their requests went unanswered, frustrated residents staged a series of protests. Police were called, arresting and imprisoning many parents and human rights advocates. Wen never intervened. One parent wrote to Wen:

       
Do you really believe in the accusations lodged by local officials that we harbored evil intentions to subvert the government? President Hu and you used to study engineering in colleges. You know very well that some school buildings had been made with substandard construction. Nonetheless, you turned a blind eye to the issue because you are afraid that we could cause instability.