The case of the Chinese mayor who wasn’t there

On the first weekend in June, residents in one of China’s richest cities were subjected to an Orwellian charade. The mayor of Shenzhen, in southern Guangdong province, had gone missing on a Friday, with no explanation provided for his absence at official events.

In neighbouring Hong Kong, the Chinese special administrative region where press freedoms are still protected, media outlets reported that Xu Zongheng was the target of a corruption probe. The official Xinhua news agency finally issued a single-sentence dispatch on Monday confirming Mr Xu’s detention for “serious violations of discipline”. An “acting mayor” was soon appointed and nothing more was said of the matter.

For almost four full days, everyone in Shenzhen turned a blind eye. Government officials who knew the mayor was in trouble spoke no evil. Local journalists and editors who were in the loop wrote no evil. It is one thing to praise the naked emperor’s fine clothes – and quite another to pretend he is there when he just ain’t.

It is true that stranger things have happened in, well, South Carolina. In June also, that US state’s married governor, Mark Sanford, went AWOL on what he later confirmed had been a South American assignation with his Argentine mistress.

But Sanford-style vanishing acts are rare in free and democratic political cultures, and they are not swept under the carpet. As soon as it was established that the governor was missing, the national press pack went looking for him. Poor Mr Sanford didn’t stand a chance of keeping his tryst secret. As they say: “Having an affair – very French. Getting caught – very American.”

In China, senior government and Communist party officials vanish all the time without causing so much as a ripple in the domestic media.

Like so many cadres before him, Mr Xu disappeared into the jaws of the Chinese Communist party’s disciplinary inspection commission. The powerful commission’s so-called shuang-gui (or “twin regulation”) powers allow it to detain party officials indefinitely. In theory, officials caught up in this extra-judicial twilight zone are merely making themselves available to party investigators and can be released later without stain. In reality, the commission’s targets are routinely handed over to government prosecutors months or even years later, all but gift-wrapped for summary show trials and sentencing.

In a more famous example of shuang-gui in action, in 2003 the head of Bank of China’s Hong Kong subsidiary disappeared for two years before resurfacing in a courtroom in Changchun, a city in the country’s far north-east. There he was convicted for a corruption spree that had allegedly begun nine years earlier in Shanghai. When it comes to “renditioning” suspects from one jurisdiction to another, the disciplinary inspection commission appears to be as accomplished as the CIA.

Mr Xu’s case is unusual in that his successor, Wang Rong, and the top party official in Guangdong, Wang Yang, each received a foreign media delegation less than a month later, giving journalists an opportunity to press for answers. It was the first time that both men, who are not related, had made themselves available to the overseas media in their current positions.

Questions about his predecessor consumed more than half of Wang Rong’s session earlier this month. “You probably know more about this case than I do,” he implausibly told the reporters, who asked whether Mr Xu’s case was just the tip of the iceberg. The acting mayor denied suggestions of a widespread corruption scandal, imploring Shenzhen residents and civil servants “not to believe these rumours or to spread them”.

It is precisely the party’s unwillingness to say anything about such investigations that ensures rumours spread far and wide. Given only Xinhua’s terse release, conspiracy theorists have speculated that the investigation into Mr Xu could be related to the detentions of China’s richest man, a shadowy former head of Guangdong’s public security department and that of a well-known television presenter, although this last case has not been confirmed. Lack of transparency also adds to the impression that the party uses corruption charges, even if well founded, as a tool for selective purges rather than real justice.

A politburo member destined for greater things on the national stage, Wang Yang was more confident and combative in tackling questions. “Some of these criminals were colleagues of ours, so the scandals are good lessons for us,” he said. “Handing out severe punishments [for corruption] is a strong warning to every one of us and that is exactly what the ruling party has been doing.”

Wang Yang was getting ahead of himself. Even the most venal party cadres in China are technically innocent until proven guilty, and Mr Xu is not a convicted criminal just yet. But in a country where everyone from human rights activists to Rio Tinto executives are routinely locked up on the basis of vague and malleable charges, how appropriate that powerful party officials can be hoisted by their own petard.

tom.mitchell@ft.com