http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-corruption-on-wheels-20120108,0,4555295.story
China Communist Party bureaucrats like their cars high end
A remnant of a decades-old Communist Party perks system, the luxe wheels are a
conspicuous target of growing public outrage over the privileges of the elite.
Angry Chinese have started posting photos.
a..
BMW 5 Series police cars are shown off at a delivery in Shanghai, China,
in March 2010, in time for use during the World Expo. (Cao Zichen, ImagineChina
/ March 30, 2010)
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By Barbara Demick
January 8, 2012
Reporting from Beijing—
Even the police are driving Porsches.
Chinese officials love their cars — big, fancy, expensive cars. A
chocolate-colored Bentley worth $560,000 is cruising the streets of Beijing
with license plates indicating it is registered to Zhongnanhai, the Communist
Party headquarters. The armed police, who handle riots and crowd control, have
the same model of Bentley in blue.
And just in case it needs to go racing off to war, the Chinese army has a black
Maserati that sells in China for $330,000.
"Corruption on wheels is an accurate description of this problem," said Wang
Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, who has
been advocating restrictions on officials' cars for years.
A remnant of a decades-old party perks system, the luxe wheels are a
conspicuous target of growing public outrage over the privileges of the elite.
Armed with cellphone cameras, angry Chinese have started posting photographs of
the expensive government cars — identifiable by their license plates — on a
microblog site called Anti-Official Cars Extravagance that was set up in
August. (Government censors shut down an earlier version of the same site.)
The Chinese government doesn't release figures, but automobile industry
analysts here say that spending for cars tops $15 billion annually, while some
scholars believe the figure is many times that amount.
Even at more conservative estimates, the figure is greater than that allocated
for low-income housing or for scientific research and development.
Not to speak of the funding for school buses.
Anger over fancy government cars has been piqued by a spate of tragic accidents
in recent months involving overloaded school buses. In the worst of them, 21
kindergartners were killed in Gansu province in November in a van that was
designed for nine passengers but was carrying 62 children.
"Every time I see a school bus accident and think about the great many
government Audi A6s on the street, I shake my head and sigh," one microblogger
who uses the name Minxingdie wrote after the accident.
The Audi A6 is the semiofficial car of the Chinese Communist Party; the German
automaker's parent, Volkswagen, was an early entry in the 1980s into the
Chinese market. According to industry analysts, there are more than 100,000 A6s
in China, about 20% of them owned by the government. Each car costs $50,000 to
$100,000, depending on engine size.
For the cops, luxury SUVs are all the rage. In the southern city of Guangzhou,
police were photographed driving a Mercedes-Benz SUV, while those in the
northeastern province of Jilin have another deluxe SUV, the Porsche Cayenne.
"No wonder there's no money left for school buses!" remarked one contributor to
the car-outrage website. The commentators were particularly scathing about the
expensive cars with military plates. "Why does the military need sports cars?
Will it help them run faster when there's a war?"
Photographs also showed cars with government, police and military plates
clearly being used on personal business: dropping off children at school, at a
shopping mall, on a family vacation.
"You can't get evidence about other kinds of corruption, such as people
accepting envelopes of cash, but this you easily see for yourself," explained
the Guangzhou-based activist who started the website in response to emailed
questions. He did not wish to be identified.
The high spending on cars, said Ren Jianmin, a professor at Beijing's Tsinghua
University, is the result of a system set up by the Communist Party in the
1940s to allocate perks to ranking members.
"The system dictates that once an official reaches a certain level, he must be
equipped with certain things, such as cars and, in the past, houses," Ren said.
"This system led to a huge number of government cars. "
Although in theory a government car is for official business, most bureaucrats
treat the car as their own to do with as they wish. Regulations that limit the
use of the car to working hours are widely disregarded.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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