Danger Lurks for Voices in Graft Battle

May 19, 2005

BEIJING (AFP) - Guo Guangyun doesn't like to go out much on the streets of Shijiazhuang, capital of China 's Hebei province, largely because of the threats to his life.

Although he is considered a people's hero for his anti-corruption efforts in bringing down the provincial government of Cheng Weigao, some want revenge, especially as up to 100 officials have been either jailed or are under investigation.

``So far the Hebei government has agreed to give me back my working status as an engineer,'' said the 61-year-old Guo, an intellectual who felt it was his duty to do something about the blatant corruption he was witnessing.

``They have been ordered by Beijing to fully rehabilitate me, but they have refused to issue a written document stating this.''

He is referring to eight years of trying to bring attention to Cheng's corrupt government in which he was repeatedly beaten, inexplicably run over by a car, fired from his job and kicked out of the ruling Communist Party.

The worst insult came when he was jailed without trial for two years in a labor camp for bringing attention to graft. He is now suffering from hypertension, diabetes and heart trouble that he developed while in jail.

After years of letter writing and lobbying, central authorities in Beijing began investigations in 2000, which so far have resulted in the execution of one of Cheng's personal secretaries and a life sentence for another.

A Hebei vice governor, meanwhile, was also given a death penalty with a two-year reprieve, which means the sentence will likely be commuted to life imprisonment.

Investigations and trials are continuing, while Cheng's son has fled to Canada , reportedly with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.

Only in 2003 was Cheng stripped of his power and he still has not been tried with many speculating that the corrupt leader's ties to former president Jiang Zemin are protecting him from prosecution.

``I don't know any of the details of Cheng's case,'' Guo said carefully. ``I know that Cheng Weigao's wife was investigated by Hebei province, but then they stopped the investigation due to an order from above.''

Cuo's case is unique only in that he succeeded in getting the corrupt leader removed from power.

Everywhere in China people are trying to report corruption to higher authorities, but instead are receiving the same treatment that Guo got.

Huang Jingao, a 52-year-old anti-graft county head in southeastern Fujian province, needs to wear a bullet proof vest due to his activities, while lawyer Zheng Enchong got a three-year jail term after he led noisy demonstrations last year of up to 2,000 people evicted in Shanghai in a crooked land scheme.

In a recent report commissioned by the UN Commission on Human Rights, a fledgling Chinese non-governmental rights organization documented 12 cases of allegedly illegal land confiscations in China that have led to the beating, jailing and even murder of those seeking legal recourse.

The report was produced by the Empowerment and Rights Institute, a largely Chinese-run organization that is testing the waters of official tolerance in the communist country.

``We have found that people everywhere are not only being abused by rampant land confiscation, but their lives sink into a cesspool of rights violations as they seek to redress the original infractions,'' said group spokesman Adam Briscoe.

The group has investigated cases discovered at a ``petitioner's village'' in Beijing, a sort of squatter camp where up to 30,000 people from all over China live as they beseech the central government with complaints over corruption and rights abuses in their hometowns, Briscoe said.

``Almost all the cases have to do with land confiscation and the ones that come to Beijing only come to Beijing because there is no justice on the local level, only abuse and rights violations.''

The group believes there are between one and nine million petitioners in China seeking redress for alleged injustices.

Part of the problem is that local party leaders also control local courts and media so any accusations against the leaders are easily squashed at the local level, he said.

During the group's continuing investigations, its members have been followed and questioned by police, with Briscoe himself last month detained and interrogated by Beijing police for several hours.

The case of Weijia village in eastern Shandong province offers one of the starkest examples of the abyss of abuse Chinese can find themselves in when they choose to confront powerful Communist Party leaders at the local level.

Since being elected as village chief in 2002 on a platform that he would investigate village finances and land confiscations, Zhi Huacheng has been repeatedly threatened with his life and beaten either directly or indirectly by party officials and police, the group's report said.

After he discovered an eight million yuan (HK$7.5 million) deficit in village finances, his daughter, son and grandson were murdered, cases in which the police and courts have apparently taken no interest.

The report attributes much of the graft to the top leader of Dangjiazhuang township, who administers Weijia and several other neighboring villages and who rules the region as a personal fiefdom with a ring of village Communist Party chiefs extorting villagers, it said.

Police in Dangjiazhuang denied that the murder of Zhi's family had anything to do with the Dangjiazhuang party committee, only saying that no trial or investigation has taken place as Zhi's son-in-law has fled and is the prime suspect in the case.

The group hopes the UN rights commission will request that the central government investigate.

Other cases the group has documented include alleged corruption at the Xiluodu Dam in southwestern Yunnan and Sichuan provinces over massive land reclamation and the relocation of at least 34,000 people in Yunnan that has resulted in loud local protests and retaliation by local leaders.

The group further cited several cases in Beijing where local officials have allegedly engaged in shady real estate projects in the name of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, resulting in the jailing of two evicted restaurant owners, Ye Guoqiang and Ye Guozhen, who organized protests over the land grab.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

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