Chapter 1: Introduction
3.3. Circles in the Sociogram
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3.3. Circles in the Sociogram
The analysts who believe that the anticorruption campaign is a political purge to directly strike down Xi’s enemies would expect to observe factions in the network of fallen tigers. In their simple version of fighting enemies interpretation, the whole point of this tiger hunt is about taking down the several top cadres in CCP who are most threatening to Xi and replacing them – and their factional subordinates who also fall – with Xi’s trusted men. Therefore, we should be able to see some highest-ranking tigers leading their respective factions around them in our colleague network.
In line with the argument of this thesis, we also expect to observe factional groups in the network, but our reasoning is not so straightforward as the above interpretation.
As we discuss in earlier chapters, in the first 29 months of his rule, Xi Jinping as the new autocrat consolidated his personal power by assuming positions and proclaiming fundamental programs. Xi’s power consolidation fuels his tiger hunt because consolidated power allows him to endure the political cost of anticorruption. In turn, the purge of corrupt cadres creates a climate in favor of Xi’s expansion of personal autocracy to the extent of breaking the post-Deng arrangements of power sharing.
Xi’s colleagues in the top leadership used to substantially share the supreme power in collective leadership, but the storm of anticorruption is so forbidding that they dare not stand in Xi’s way anymore. In short, the anticorruption campaign helps Xi transcend from a first-among-equal leader to an unchallengeable autocrat. By this token, the factional groups that fall in this campaign, if any, are not only Xi’s rivals but also set as examples for the larger audience of regime elites to see what shall happen to those against Xi Jinping’s cause.
No matter how we interpret this campaign, we share a common interest of finding out what factional groups there are in the network and who are the patrons and clients of
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these factional groups. We are able to diagram the colleague network of tigers with the career information and colleague relations coded as the previous two sections specify. We apply the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm for a force-directed layout (Fruchterman & Reingold, 1991) in R program to transform the relational data of colleagueship into a network. (See Figure 3-2) The sociogram consists of 104 nodes, each representing a senior corrupt cadre we record. 18 nodes are isolated because these tigers do not have any colleague relations with others. 8 nodes have only one tie and thus make 4 isolated dyads. The other 78 corrupt cadres form the one major component in this network. Node size signifies the rank level of each tiger. All of the 4 national leaders in the network are marked with brackets in the Figure 3-2.
Figure 3-2: Colleague Network of Tigers
A faction is a political action group led by its patron and weaved by exchange of political resources. The factional leader provides his followers with patronage protection and the following cadres pledge loyalty to the patron and participate in his
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collective action in return. In order to sustain such a factional group, the patron should have unequal relations with each of the following cadres, which puts him in an advantageous position to offer political patronage. (Nathan, 1973) This inequality of status can be prima facie established by the difference of administrative rank level. A patron should be a national leader or at least significantly higher-ranking than all his followers. Structurally, a faction is expected to be in a spoke-hub paradigm. A faction is articulated through one node (as the primary patron) or a few nodes (secondary patrons included). The patron, in the center, has linkage to each of his followers in a dyadic – rather than corporate – pattern. (Nathan, 1973) This structural requirement leads us to look for local networks in a radial pattern.
We look for local networks in spoke-hub structures with higher-ranking tigers in the center. In Figure 3-2, we identify 5 potential factional groups, labeled as circles. Zhou Yongkang, the only full-state-level cadre in our data and thus the highest-ranking tiger, is situated in the very center of the major component. He was a Standing Member of Politburo and took charge of the security apparatus and law enforcing institutions from 2007 to 2012. He is tied with cadres who have working experience in CNPC, MLR, Sichuan Province, MPS, other subordinate units under CPLC and Xinjiang (marked by the dashed “Zhou Yongkang Circle” in Figure 3-2).
Two of the three vice-state-level leaders34 in the network are identified with circles.
Xu Caihou, a Vice-Chairman of CMC between 2004 and 2012, is in a relatively peripheral position partly because he apparently cannot have colleague relations with most civilian cadres. Moreover, most PLA generals who fall for corruption are not professionally linked to Xu. All of his direct colleague relations are formed by his experience in the General Politics Department (marked by the dashed “Xu Caihou
34 A 4th vice-state-level leader, Guo Boxiong, was put under disciplinary inspection later in April 2015 after the cutting point of this thesis. Guo was the other Vice-Chairman besides Xu Caihou during Hu Jintao’s presidency.
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Circle” in Figure 3-2). Su Rong, a semi-retired Vice-Chairman of National Committee of CPPCC, is in the center of his subordinates who had worked for him in Jiangxi Province, Qinghai Province, Gansu Province, and Jilin Province (marked by the dashed “Su Rong Circle” in Figure 3-2).
Two circles are without national leaders. Bai Enpei is a seasoned full-provincial-level cadre with exceptional seniority and 7 tigers around him form a potential factional group. Bai is a semi-retired former Party Chief of Yunnan Province and Qinghai Province and a former Deputy Party Chief of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
The structure of this “Bai Enpei Circle” (marked by dashed circle in Figure 3-2) resembles the spoke-hub paradigm too. The Shanxi Circle, however, does not have a higher-ranking tiger as its leader, nor is it structured in a radial pattern. Shanxi Circle is identified because it contains the only a clique35 in this network. Among the 12 tigers in or from Shanxi Province (marked by the dashed “Shanxi Circle” in Figure 3-2), 8 of them form a clique in which each node is tied with all others36.
Not every national leader is a hub of a faction-like circle. Ling Jihua, the last national leader in this tiger network, was a Vice-Chairman of National Committee of CPPCC and the Director of Central United Front Department. He became well known as a top aide of Hu Jintao when he directed Central General Office during Hu’s tenure. Before he was promoted to Central General Office, he had served for years in the General Office of the Central Committee of CCYL. These two general office positions tie him with the senior corrupt cadres who were persons-in-charge of provinces/institutions
35 In graph theory, “clique” refers to a maximal complete subnetwork containing at least three nodes and every two of them are connected. It has the maximal density that any two of the nodes that are possible to be connected are connected. For a detailed explanation of the concepts of component, clique, faction, density and others, see Chapter 3 in de Nooy, Mrvar & Batagelj (2005) and Chapter 11 in Borgatti, Everett & Johnson (2013).
36 The clique consists of 8 tigers. 7 of them, Jin Daoming (金道銘), Fang Wenping (方文平), Shen Weichen (申維 辰), Du Shanxue (杜善學), Chen Chuanping (陳川平), Nie Chunyu (聶春玉), Bai Yun (白雲), and Liang Bin (梁 濱), are maximally interconnected. The 8th node in Shanxi clique can be either Ren Runhou (任潤厚) or Ling Zhengce (令政策). These two nodes are not tied to each other but both of them are connected with all the other 7 nodes in Shanxi clique.
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during Ling’s Central General Office tenure and those provincial secretaries of CCYL during Ling’s CCYL general office tenure. General office directors, nonetheless, can only coordinate cadres in other provinces/institutions, not command them. Ling Jihua, when he was the Director of Central General Office, was in no position to give orders to the ministers or provincial party chiefs, nor was he considered as a bureaucratic colleague of them. Therefore, an imaginary circle centered on Ling does not exist.
To sum up here, we find 5 circles in the network by visual inspection. The local networks of 4 circles present spoke-hub structures as factional theorists expect. The nodes as hubs are either national leaders (Zhou Yongkang, Su Rong, and Xu Caihou) or the highest-ranking cadre among the circle members (Bai Enpei). The 5th circle, Shanxi Circle, is a clique with maximal density and does not have a node as a clear center. One national leader, Ling Jihua, is not identified with a circle around him because his colleague-generating positions are coordinating rather than commanding.
Ling does not have factional ties with other tigers.
These circles are subject to further examination. One major issue is that circles drawn this way are not mutually exclusive. For example, Jiang Jiemin (蔣潔敏) is put into both Su Rong Circle and Bai Enpei Circle. Jiang spent most time of his career in CNPC (once directed by Zhou Yongkang) and had worked in the provincial government of Qinghai (first under Bai Enpei and then under Su Rong). Another tiger who fell down from Qinghai Province, Mao Xiaobing (毛小兵), has the same issue because he had worked both under Bai Enpei and Su Rong. Strictly speaking, the overlapping of circles contradicts what clientelist conception of faction requires. In this thesis, though, overlapping of factional groups in their peripheries is tolerated because it makes better sense in political reality.
Moreover, visual inspection cannot decide in certainty if the hub node situated in the
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center is an actual patron. Administrative rank levels only assist but do not conclude the case. A weak leader with bare influence in the party’s leadership might be at vice-state level only because he is awarded a trivial vice-chairmanship in the National People’s Congress or National Committee of CPPCC. A seasoned and influential leader may stop at full-provincial level in the ladder of administrative ranking, but his connections to the core of party leadership make him resourceful and capable of sustaining his own faction. The administrative rank level is not conclusive with regard to the actual influence of a cadre amongst the regime elites. Here we are in the position of introducing relational statistics in network analysis to help us quantitatively determine whether the possible patrons with the highest rank level indeed occupy the most central positions in their circles.