Tianjin Mayor Caught Up in Xi’s Antigraft Campaign

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/world/asia/tianjin-mayor-caught-up-in-xis-antigraft-campaign.html

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BEIJING — President Xi Jinping’s grinding campaign against graft and disloyalty in the Chinese government claimed another powerful victim over the weekend, when the Communist Party’s disciplinary agency announced that the mayor of Tianjin, a northern port city, was under investigation.

As usual for such announcements, the agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, did not describe specific charges against the mayor, Huang Xingguo, who had also been serving as the acting party secretary of Tianjin, which is about 70 miles south of Beijing.

Instead, a terse statement from the commission late Saturday simply said Mr. Huang was “suspected of severe disciplinary violations.” That wording is usually the party’s shorthand for taking bribes and other kinds of corruption.

Even without details of Mr. Huang’s suspected misdeeds, the message will be clear to Communist Party officials: Mr. Xi has not stopped his campaign against graft, abuses of power and resistance to his policies, although nearly four years have passed since he took office and the first officials began to fall.

An editorial in the Tianjin Daily, the city’s main official newspaper, detailed that warning. The inquiry into Mr. Huang “fully demonstrates that anyone who violates party discipline and state laws will be sternly dealt with, no matter who it is, no matter what post,” the editorial said. Almost always, officials found culpable of serious graft by party investigators later face a separate criminal investigation, trial and prison sentence.

Mr. Huang, 61, worked in the Tianjin government for nearly 13 years, and the paper obliquely warned officials there against grumbling about his ouster. “Resolutely support and obey the decision from the center,” it said, referring to the party’s top leadership.

The Communist Party leadership is entering a delicate period in its political calendar: the buildup to a congress, most likely late next year, which will replace retiring central leaders with new ones who will work under Mr. Xi in his second term of five years.

The party’s Central Committee — a council with about 200 senior officials as voting members — will hold its annual meeting next month, and precedent suggests that the meeting will formally set in motion preparations for the congress. Jockeying for promotions, and rumors about others’ downfall, are likely to intensify in the coming year.

The scandal is another blow for Tianjin, a city of industry and ports that has long striven to escape the shadow of Beijing. Under past leaders, Tianjin spent big on building a financial district, which failed to attract much interest.

In August last year, warehouses storing dangerous chemicals near Tianjin’s dockland erupted in a cluster of explosions, killing 173 people and exposing laxity and abuses that had laid the way for disaster. Mr. Huang was among the city officials who publicly apologized for the disaster.

Even before Mr. Huang’s downfall, dozens of Tianjin officials had been toppled in graft inquiries. Last month, party graft investigators announced that they were examining charges against a deputy mayor of Tianjin, Yin Hailin.

Mr. Huang rose up the party ranks in Zhejiang Province, in eastern China, where his career path briefly crossed with that of Mr. Xi, who worked there as governor and provincial party secretary.

Mr. Huang had been mayor of Tianjin for nearly nine years, and the acting party secretary of Tianjin for 21 months, an unusually long time to wait for full confirmation in that job. In China, party secretaries are more powerful than mayors, and the wait suggests that there may have been some misgivings about confirming Mr. Huang.

Tianjin is one of four big Chinese municipalities — the others are Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing — that answer directly to the central government, rather than through provincial administrations. Serving as party chief in these cities has often been a steppingstone to promotion into the Politburo, which brings together the party’s top 25 leaders.

Before his downfall, Mr. Huang appeared as eager as any official to show his loyalty to Mr. Xi. This year, he was among dozens of local leaders who pledged their fealty to Mr. Xi as a “core” leader, a term suggesting special stature.

“Resolutely and unwaveringly clean up party and government and fight corruption,” Mr. Huang told Tianjin officials in late June. “In thought, politics and action, always stay tightly in step with the party center under Comrade Xi Jinping as general secretary.”