In China's corruption crackdown, a few fallen giants may well be enough
Tim Collard says with its seemingly ambivalent approach to fighting corruption, Beijing is seeking as much to warn senior officials to behave as it is going all out to catch and punish offenders
What are we to make of the mixed signals given by President Xi Jinping's leadership team on official corruption, and the enrichment of officials and their family, either directly at the state's expense or by extortion from business and the public? It was a nettle that Xi seemed keen to grasp at the very outset of his administration, announcing that "tigers" as well as "flies" would be caught up in the inexorable net of the party's disciplinary apparatus.
And it cannot be denied that radical steps have indeed been taken. First was the removal of Bo Xilai from his entrenched position of power; Bo's real crime was challenging the whole style and modus operandi of the leadership rather than corruption, but his family's financial affairs and his wife's bizarre behaviour provided the means of destroying him.
And now we see the forces of justice closing in on Zhou Yongkang and his network of cronies. Meanwhile, senior leaders placed reforming the "work style" of party cadres at the very top of the agenda for last month's National People's Congress session, and the president himself pointedly allowed himself to be seen eating simple food in a simple restaurant, without a champagne glass in sight.
However, this campaign is to be kept within strict bounds. Financial irregularities may only be uncovered by the top echelons of the party, not by ordinary people or - worse still - by foreigners.
When was found to be conducting investigations into the mysterious wealth of relatives of Chinese leaders who have remained in good standing at home, their operations in China were severely hampered as a result of official displeasure.
More recently, a row has blown up within the Bloomberg operation, as one of their reporters was prevented by management from continuing his research into a similar story, explicitly because it looked likely to antagonise the Chinese, whose co-operation was needed for Bloomberg's financial information service. This kind of trimming is painful for Americans, but China won't mind that at all.
So is the Chinese government's attitude merely hypocritical? Are they simply using the anti-corruption campaign as an excuse to purge internal enemies, while allowing the favoured few to carry on as ever? I think it is more complicated than that.
