Chapter 1: Introduction
2.3. Succession and Outsider Successors
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2.3. Succession and Outsider Successors
In the last section of this chapter, we look into the succession of tigers and see who fill in the vacancies. We are interested in the background of successors, especially whether they are promoted or transferred from the same provinces/institutions where the tigers fall, or they are outsiders to their new positions without working experience in these given provinces/institutions or approximate ones.
Analysts that see Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign as a factional purge would expect him to heavily deploy outsider succession. There are two succession strategies that Xi can use to extend his reach in the party-state. The first strategy is an apparent one: to put his own loyalists to positions vacated by tigers’ downfall. The issue with this strategy is whom Xi can completely trust. The last thing an autocrat needs in his power consolidation is promoting someone to key posts who in the end turn against him. We can reasonably expect Xi to play safe and promote or transfer those who he personally knows. As a new paramount leader who has just risen to power, however, his personal connections are quite limited and it is not so likely that he can find a trusted successor in any given province/institution in his early tenure. It is only logical to assume, therefore, that Xi would find someone he trusts from outside the province/institution to fill in the post.
The second strategy involves a tacit exchange of promotion for loyalty. Xi as a new leader does not yet have personal connections extensive enough to cover all major provinces/institutions, but he would try to build such personal patronage by political exchange. The vacant positions left by tigers become bargaining chips that Xi holds.
He looks for cadres who are willing to pledge loyalty to him in exchange for the vacancies. In this tacit strategy of succession, Xi recruits new clients by offering offices. This is riskier that the apparent strategy: there is always an uncertainty about
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the loyalty of new recruits. We do not trust new friends as much as old pals, especially when the political stakes are so high.
From the perspective of fighting corruption, outsider succession is an effective – although incomplete – measure to deal with nest corruption. The downfall of a tiger usually implies that the position he holds exposes him to abundant opportunities for corruption that can corrupt his successor alike. It is particularly true in nest corruption cases where a majority of cadres in one province/institution are compromised. If the successors of nest case tigers are promoted or transferred within the same province/institution, it may be just a matter of time for the successors to become future tigers because they are too well socialized in the local political-economic ecology. The corruption-inducing factors can easily work on these insider successors.
Successors from outside, however, are less likely to be corrupted because they do not possess previous connections to local business and fellow colleagues. (Cheng, 2014; S.
Wang, 2014a; Zhong, 2014).
We summarize the empirical implications here. First, if outsider succession is mostly observed in nest corruption cases, we can infer that Xi Jinping applies outsider succession as a strategy for anticorruption rather than an apparent strategy for factional struggle. Second, on the contrary, if outsider succession does not concentrate in nest cases, it implies that these outsider successors can be Xi’s loyalists who are trusted to take key positions. Third, the dichotomy of insider vs. outsider succession cannot tell if Xi adopts the tacit succession strategy. Such tacit exchange of office for loyalty may well happen under insider succession.
Now we examine the empirics about outsider succession and see if they are deployed to deal with nest corruption cases or to place Xi’s associates to key positions. Our information of succession is compiled from CCP official media reports on personnel
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military officers is often classified and thus the PLA officers are beyond our capacity of analysis. 18 tigers had retired or semi-retired before their downfall, and so there is no succession issue in these cases. We are unable to find succession information of 2 civilian tigers because their work involves national security. As a result, we have 53 senior corrupt cadres whose succession is ready for analysis. They include 31 cases of insider succession and 22 cases of outsider succession. We categorize them into four groups according to the rank levels of fallen tigers: 1) vice-provincial level; 2) vice-provincial level with alternative membership of Central Committee or full membership of CCDI; 3) full-provincial level; and 4) full-provincial level with full membership of Central Committee or CCDI. (See Figure 2-5)Figure 2-5: Frequency of Insider and Outsider Succession
Note:
1. VP: vice-provincial level; VP (AM): vice-provincial level with alternative membership of Central
Committee or full membership of CCDI; FP: full-provincial level; FP (FM): full-provincial level with full membership of Central Committee or CCDI.
2. Ling Jihua is counted at full-provincial level with full membership of Central Committee.
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Statistics do not support the argument that Xi Jinping heavily deploys outsider succession to place his own men in key positions. 25 vice-provincial-level tigers are replaced with insiders and 14 with outsiders. 4 vice-provincial-level tigers who are alternative members of Central Committee have insiders as their successors, and 5 tigers in this group have outsider successors. The only full-provincial-level corrupt cadre has his position taken by an outsider. In the 4 cases of full-provincial-level tigers who are also full members of Central Committee or CCDI, insider and outsider succession each makes half the cases. In each group, the number of outsider successors is either almost equal to the number of insider successors, or notably less.
When we put the 22 outsider succession cases under scrutiny, we find the successors in 8 of them are not exactly from “outside” their new province/institution. Technically these 8 successors are promoted or transferred from another province/institution, but their previous working units are very approximate to their new ones. For example, Cao Guangjing (曹廣晶), who fills in the vacancy of Vice-Governor of Hubei Province left by Guo Youming (郭有明), is formerly the President of China Three Gorges Corporation, a vice-provincial-level central SOE of hydraulic engineering.
The majority of its business is the construction, maintenance and management of the Three Gorges Dam situated right in the province of Hubei. Much of Cao’s career is actually “inside” Hubei Province even if he is an outsider administratively. Song Lin (宋林), the former President of China Resources, is succeeded by Fu Yuning (傅育寧)
who was the President of
China Merchants Group before the transfer.China
Resources and
China Merchants Group are two vice-provincial-level SOEs both headquartered in Hong Kong and managers of these two groups have always cooperated with and competed against each other. A similar case of “outside but approximate” succession is the replacement of Xu Jianyi (徐建一). Xu Jianyi was in charge of the China FAW Group Corporation, a leading SOE in the automobile‧
approximate to each other.Table 2-2: Genuine Outsider Succession Cases
Name Rank Level1 Remark
Ji Wenlin VP Tied to Zhou Yongkang
Jin Daoming
VP In Shanxi CircleDu Shanxue VP In Shanxi Circle
Nie Chunyu VP In Shanxi Circle
Bai Yun VP In Shanxi Circle
Sun Zhaoxue VP
Sun Hongzhi VP
Wan Qingliang VP (AM)
Chen Chuanping VP (AM) In Shanxi Circle
Wang Min VP (AM)
Qiu He VP (AM) Tied to Bai Enpei
He Jiacheng FP
Shen Weichen FP (DM)
In Shanxi CircleLing Jihua VS (FM) National Leader
Note:
1. VP: vice-provincial level; VP (AM): vice-provincial level with alternative membership of Central Committee; FP: full-provincial level; FP (DM): full-provincial level with full membership of CCDI;
VS (FM): vice-state level with full membership of Central Committee.
The remaining 14 cases are “genuine” outsider succession, about 1/4 of all civilian succession. (See Table 2-2) An analysis of these genuine outsider successors makes the fighting enemies theory even less convincing because only two of them are to take the places left by tigers in relation to potential factional groups30. Ji Wenlin (冀文林) and Qiu He (仇和), tied to Zhou Yongkang and Bai Enpei (白恩培) respectively, are replaced with outsiders. In fact, half of the 14 outsider succession cases are either to deal with nest corruption or by necessity. 6 outsider successors are put in place of
30 For the identification of potential factional groups, see Section 3.3.
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tigers involved in the Shanxi nest corruption case, and the outsider succession of Ling Jihua is by necessity because there is no other national leader in Central United Front Department. The other 5 outsider succession cases are neither by necessity nor related to any potential factional groups.
To summarize, more vacancies left by civilian tigers are filled in by insider successors than outsiders. Genuine outsider succession in which the promoted or transferred cadres are neither from within the given province/institution nor from institutions approximate to his new positions are fairly rare, making only about 1/4 of all cases.
Among the 14 genuine outsider succession cases, only 2 are related to potential factional groups, yet 6 are clearly to deal with nest corruption in Shanxi Province.
In this section, the thesis studies succession of tigers and examines whether Xi Jinping heavily deploys outsider succession in order to replace his rivals with his own loyalists. The answer is no. In choosing successors of fallen tigers, Xi Jinping puts the party’s organizational rules and the regime’s political stability before the candidates’
loyalty to himself. He usually promotes or transfers cadres from the same province/institution to replace fallen tigers. If not possible, he turns to the second best option by finding outsiders from approximate provinces/institutions. Genuine outsider succession cases are rare, and half of them are either to deal with nest corruption or by necessity. Mostly in case of nest corruption, Xi finds himself obliged to put outsiders in the given province/institution in order to refresh local politics. It can be concluded that Xi Jinping does not take the apparent strategy by promoting his clients to key posts in the tiger hunt, but we cannot rule out the possibility that Xi adopts the tacit succession strategy of recruiting new clients by offering offices to them.
2.4. Summary
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This chapter discusses the temporal distribution, geographical/functional distribution, and the succession of tigers. In temporal distribution, we observe a swift launch of the campaign after Xi Jinping assumed power and an upward trend of monthly frequency of tigers as Xi’s power consolidation process unfolds. High tides of tiger hunt generally follow significant events that consolidate Xi’s position, and low tides occur during those events. The monthly frequency of tigers suggests that the new autocrat’s power consolidation drives anticorruption campaign instead of the other way around.
In the second section, we find that senior corrupt cadres are widely scattered across provinces and functional units in both civilian government and PLA. Moreover, tigers tend to be concentrated in institutions that are prone to economic corruption. That said, the absence of tigers in Beijing and Shanghai supports our earlier argument that it is imperative for the new autocrat to first consolidate power and then upgrade anticorruption. Lastly, the statistics of succession show that outsider succession does not prevail over insider succession, which means Xi Jinping does not take advantage of anticorruption to promote his men to key positions in an apparent way. The findings in this chapter, together, suggest that the campaign, fueled by power consolidation of the autocrat, is indeed fighting corruption. The campaign also serves to create a climate that facilitates Xi’s establishment of his autocracy beyond first-among-equals leadership in the power-sharing arrangements in the post-Deng era.
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Chapter 3: Colleague Network of Tigers
In Chapter 2 we discuss the temporal and provincial/functional distribution of tigers and their succession. The time point of tigers’ downfall, the provincial/functional belongings of tigers and the professional background their successors are all independently distributed tiger attributes. In the following two chapters, we turn to relational data and study the network of senior corrupt cadres. We are interested in the structures in which these tigers are interconnected. We are particularly keen on the question whether there are local structures in the network that qualify as factional groups.
In this chapter, we apply techniques of network analysis to identify potential factional groups. Fallen tigers are the nodes of this network and their colleague relations are ties. We compile information of their entire career tracks and code all meaningful overlapping during their decades-long services. Then we take advantage of a kind of centrality measurement, PageRank, to help us decide whether the circles that stand out in visual inspection actually qualify as factional groups.