Database Tracks ‘Tigers and Flies’ Caught in Xi Jinping’s Corruption Crackdown

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/asia/china-database-tigers-and-flies-xi-jinping.html

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Two days after taking control of the world’s most powerful political party in November 2012, Xi Jinping warned his fellow Chinese Communist Party members that their six decades of rule was in jeopardy because of what he saw as endemic corruption eating away at the party’s authority and effectiveness.

Early that December, a deputy party secretary in Sichuan Province, Li Chuncheng, became the first senior official to fall under Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign. Many other officials followed over the next three years, both “tigers” (senior officials) and “flies” (lower-ranking cadres).

In fact, so many have fallen — more than 140 tigers and thousands of flies — that it is very difficult for China scholars and journalists to keep track of them all and spot patterns in the crackdown.

Staff members at ChinaFile, an online magazine run by the Asia Society, have now made that task easier. They have spent months compiling the corruption cases announced since Mr. Xi took power, and presenting them in a visual format online.

The fall of a Chinese official is not easy to represent graphically. There are circles of hell that they pass through. First comes the announcement by the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection that an official is under investigation, often accompanied by an announcement of the official’s dismissal. Many officials are then expelled from the party and referred to the criminal justice system for prosecution. Last comes the trial and the nearly inevitable guilty verdict. The ChinaFile “Catching Tigers and Flies” database aims to document each phase, as well as the links between those caught up in the campaign.

The eyes of journalists following China may glaze over each time Xinhua or China Central Television announces that yet another vice mayor of a regional capital has lost his or her job. But the same information viewed in aggregate, sorted by geography, chronology or sector, yields some fascinating — and newsworthy — patterns.

ChinaFile’s visual tool can be sorted geographically by province, chronologically, by sector (military, politics, law, petroleum, and mining, for example), and even between tigers and flies.

Here is an example of how the database can be used to illustrate, or even anchor, journalism and scholarly research. Correlation does not imply causation, but the tool uncovers an interesting pattern: Provinces where Mr. Xi served for many years have not seen as many top officials fall in corruption campaigns as neighboring provinces.

In Fujian, a province racked by a widespread smuggling scandal in the 1990s, while Mr. Xi was rising in the ranks — on his way to the governorship by the end of the decade — only two senior officials have been toppled, and both only last year. In contrast, in neighboring Jiangxi Province, with a similar population, five senior officials have been toppled, the first in 2013.

Immediately to the north of Fujian is wealthy Zhejiang Province. Mr. Xi, who became the country’s president in March 2013, was the top official there from 2002 to 2007. Not counting two major generals assigned to the province, only two top officials there have fallen, both for adultery and the first only at the end of 2014, two years into the anticorruption campaign, according to the ChinaFile database.

Nationwide, ChinaFile tracked 146 senior officials and 1,316 lower-ranking officials who have been under investigation, expelled from the party, or tried and convicted.

The database actually starts more than a year before Mr. Xi took power, but the handful of officials who fell in that year illustrates how extensive this campaign has been. Hovering above the individual stick figures on the database representing the 1,462 officials who have been tracked displays connections to other fallen cadres. The former security chief, Zhou Yongkang, expelled from the party in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison for corruption in 2015, for example, generates a spider web of links to disgraced former officials in his circle of influence.