FT: Party uses prison visits to scare officials straight

A police officer guards a corridor that is forbidden for visiting journalists to see during a government-organized tour of the Number One Detention Center in Beijing, Oct. 25, 2012

Chinese officials are being sent on prison visits in a new, “scared-straight” approach to warn them of the perils of bribe-taking, the Financial Times reported yesterday.
According to an article by Charles Clover in Beijing, this month 70 officials from central Hubei province met former colleagues serving sentences for corruption during a day spent touring the inside of a local prison.
Under President Xi Jinping, China has undertaken the largest anti-corruption crackdown in decades in an effort to clean up the sprawling Communist party bureaucracy.
Mr Xi has vowed to tackle high-ranking “tigers” as well as lowly “flies”. More than 100 high-ranking officials have been placed under investigation for corruption since 2012, while tens of thousands of lower-level officials have been arrested.
The party’s draconian Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which is spearheading the corruption campaign and has organized the prison visits nationwide, said they were part of an “educational approach” to fighting corruption, the FT revealed.
The tours featured visits of former officials now languishing in jail, such as Lu Xingguo, former head of land resources in Hubei’s Fang district, who used to be nicknamed “the three-plenty secretary . . . plenty of buddies, plenty of gambling parties and plenty of cash”, according to the Qinchu Web, a provincial party-affiliated news website quoted by the British daily.
“The three-plenty secretary reminds all cadres to be mindful of their social circles, to purify their circle of friends and to rectify their work relationships,” the Chinese article quoted the tour guide as saying.
Participants reportedly met 15 former colleagues who are now behind bars, who admonished them to steer clear of a life of crime and to educate themselves about public service to avoid suffering the same fate.
“I will take this as a lesson, and always be on my guard,” the mainland newspaper quoted the head of one municipality as saying. “I must not err when it comes to self-discipline and integrity.”
However, the public, largely a jeering bystander on the sidelines of top-level party intrigue, found much to laugh at in the prison-visit scheme.
According to the Financial Times, Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, was rife with ridicule yesterday.
“For them this is just a theme party. They are all thinking about where to go to have a banquet after cleansing their souls,” said one Weibo user, going by the handle Ladycheng.
In other provinces, prison tours similar to those in Hubei have been supplemented by visits to military bases, where officials and their spouses dress up in People’s Liberation Army Uniforms and chant revolutionary slogans.