Screenshot of Xu Jiatun
in the television program This Week by Hong Kong broadcaster Radio
Television Hong Kong TV 31. (RTHK 31)
Xu Jiatun, a 100-year-old, former elite Chinese Communist
Party official turned defector, chooses his words carefully. In the two
decades he has lived in exile—he defected after the June 4 massacre in
1989—he has only given a handful of interviews to Hong Kong media, and
says little that’s worthy of a good headline.
After an emergency spell in a Los Angeles hospital, however, he
appears to have thought it time to confide his musings and hopes for
current Party politics in a well-known Hong Kong journalist.
Simon Kei Shek Ming, the 2009 winner of the prestigious Society of
Publishers in Asia’s Journalist of the Year award, has had about a dozen
informal interview sessions with Xu over the past eight years. Kei,
formerly with the reputable Chinese language magazine Yazhou Zhoukan,
connected with Xu in Los Angeles, and got the centenarian to share his
thoughts on Party leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.
Now, steps are being taken to go after bigger tigers.
From the late 1970s to the 1980s, Xu held prominent positions in the
Chinese regime: he was a member of the Communist Party’s elite Central
Committee, governor of Jiangsu Province, and was the head of Party
mouthpiece Xinhua in Hong Kong, the Party’s de facto presence in the
then-British colony. He went into exile in the United States in 1990
because he opposed the Tiananmen Square massacre, and was expelled from
the Party in 1991, after Jiang Zemin, leader at the time, got wind of
the defection.
Somehow, Xu appears to remain a staunch believer in the Party, though
has no kind words for the Party officials that effectively ruled from
the time of his exile until recently. Xu resides in Chino Hill, Los
Angeles.
“China, in 30 years of reform and opening, has unexpectedly achieved a
level of development that the West only attained after 300 years of
industrialization,” Xu told Simon Kei. The interview was published in
The Initium, a new Hong Kong-based news website.
“However, Jiang Zemin and Li Peng placed their interests above all
else during their reign,” Xu added. Jiang the former Party chief, and Li
the ex-Chinese premier had “formed cliques, engaged in corrupt
activities with their children, and bred streaks of tigers and swarms of
flies everywhere in China.”
Xi Jinping coined the term “tigers and flies” at the start of his
anti-corruption campaign in 2013 to reference venal and crooked elite
and low-ranking officials.
There is basis for Xu’s critique of Jiang and Li, the inheritors and
propagators of Party paramount Deng Xiaoping’s bureaucratic capitalism,
or the use of political power for private, monetary gain.
Jiang had built up a sprawling political network during his time in
office, and continued to influence Chinese politics for over a decade
after relinquishing the position of Party leader. (He only gave up the
military chair three years later.) Elder son Jiang Mianheng leveraged
his father’s prestige to build up a telecommunications empire, while
younger son Jiang Miankeng had a stranglehold on the transportation and
public works industry in Shanghai.
Li Xiaolin,
the daughter of former premier Li Peng, was for many years a state
electricity mogul, and until last year, was the CEO of the Hong
Kong-based China Power International, a subsidiary of one of China’s
five biggest electricity companies. In 2015, the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that Li and her husband
had a Swiss bank account with about $2.5 million, and the Panama Papers
showed that Li owned an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands;
offshore companies are often used as tax havens by the wealthy.
Conversely, Xu Jiatun holds Hu Jintao, Jiang’s immediate successor,
and Hu’s premier Wen Jiabao in good esteem. In a 2008 interview with
journalist Kei, Xu said that Hu and Wen, had, “in the face of disaster,
showed ‘people-oriented’ governance by respecting the rights and values
of the people, and embraced the philosophy of ‘serving the people.'”
“Not just me, but fair-minded people everywhere rated them highly,” he added.
He has similar regard for Xi Jinping.
“After the 18th National Congress, the Party leadership of Xi Jinping
has not only cleaned up the ranks and restored China’s traditional
national virtues, but also arrested tigers and flies,” Xu said. “Tigers
have been arrested regardless of position or power, such as Bo Xilai and
Zhou Yongkang, and Xu Caihou and Gu Junshan in the military; they have
been purged, expelled from the Party, and dealt with in accordance with
the law.”
Bo, Zhou, Xu Caihou and Gu Junshan all occupied important positions in the political web woven by Jiang Zemin.
Jiang had intended for former Chongqing chief Bo Xilai to take over
Zhou Yongkang as security czar—and perpetuate Jiang’s control—at an
important political conclave in 2012. The plan, however, was derailed
when former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun outed a Bo and Zhou plot
to eventually displace Xi Jinping as Party leader to the Americans when
he tried to defect at a U.S. consulate in Chengdu.
When it came to the takedown of Jiang’s army designees,
anti-corruption investigators had to bring in several trucks to haul
away the ill-gotten loot accumulated by the late Xu Caihou, the former second-in-command of the Party’s military governing body, and Gu Junshan the former military logistics general.
Xu says it’s far from over.
“Now, steps are being taken to go after bigger tigers,” he told journalist Simon Kei.
Given how extensive the anti-corruption campaign has already been,
there are only so many “bigger tigers” available to be removed. Perhaps
the only men that fit this description are Jiang Zemin and his key
henchman, former Chinese vice president Zeng Qinghong.
Last year, state mouthpiece People’s Daily
published an editorial calling for Party elders to stop interfering in
current political affairs, and the anti-corruption agency criticized a long-dead Manchu noble. Both were interpreted by observers as public warnings against Jiang and Zeng. A large stone
stelae bearing the calligraphy of Jiang Zemin was also unceremoniously
removed from the entrance to the Central Party School, the regime’s
ideological training ground, in Beijing. (As the public engaged in heady
speculation that it was a blow against Jiang, School officials said
that it had been moved inside the campus—though whether this indeed took
place was unclear.)
The menacing winks continued this year. In speeches published in a book and in state media, Xi Jinping
identified Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, general Xu Caihou, and two other
Jiang patrons, as being guilty of having “carried out political
conspiracies to wreck and split the Party,” and charged some Party
elders with playing “taishang huang,” or power behind the throne.
Chinese media have this year been awash with reports of
investigations by the Party’s internal disciplinary inspectors of
departments and companies linked with Jiang’s sons in Shanghai. Anti-corruption inspectors also recently investigated over two dozen government agencies in the city, long the
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