One of the Chinese Communist Party’s practices to curb corruption — assigning officials to positions far from their home base — has inflicted emotional hardships and actually contributed to misdeeds, according to a new study.
The survey of 458 party officials found that “more than half the cadres have had to work in cities where their families are not located and 75.6 percent of these have set up separate households,” wrote Qiao Cuixia, who conducted the research, in an article in Study Times, a party journal. “The average time spent at jobs in other cities was five and a half years.”
Ms. Qiao, the deputy director of the economics department at Shandong Normal University, previously taught at the Shandong Provincial Party School for 16 years. She wrote that she wanted to research the “real conditions of cadres’ lives” after being struck by how many corruption investigations of officials also involved accusations of adultery.
“The emotional shambles of some officials’ lives is closely related to their work situation,” Ms. Qiao wrote. “The emotional void caused by long years of marital separation cannot be ignored as a cause of family crises.”
Even when officials don’t live apart from their families, their work entails long absences from home and prevents them from meeting their family responsibilities, she said in an interview with The Beijing News. Only 15 percent of the surveyed officials had attended meetings for parents at their children’s schools and one fifth had never taken a vacation with their families.
Contributing to the separations are party regulations aimed at reducing corruption by assigning cadres to areas where they have few personal or professional connections. In 2006, new rules on postings were issued that bar officials from taking senior positions in departments including local party committees, government offices, inspection committees, organization departments, courts, procurator’s offices and police offices in counties where they’ve grown up, and they discourage them from taking leadership roles in such departments in their home cities.
Currently, at least 23 of the party’s Central Organization Department’s 30 provincial-level leadership posts are held by people who had not worked in that locality before.
In 2012, Li Yuanchao, now China’s vice president but then head of the Central Organization Department, said that the Ministry of Public Security should aim to fill provincial-level offices with people who had not previously lived or worked in that province, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
As of 2011, more than 60 percent of the provincial leaders of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had been “transferred from different provinces,” according to the Southern Weekend newspaper. The article said that assigning cadres away from their home bases had played an important role in “allowing the commission to fulfill its mission of investigating and curbing corruption.”
According to Ms. Qiao’s survey, 94.8 percent of cadres “often feel stress” and 49 percent said they were currently feeling “higher than usual or extremely high stress.” Families were among the sources of stress for 63.2 percent of the respondents.
Even as officials’ family lives have come under greater pressure, the Communist Party has been taking a harder public line in punishing its cadres’ misdeeds, by using the explicit label “adultery” to describe extramarital affairs, whereas in the past it usually referred euphemistically to “moral corruption.”
On July 2, five officials placed under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection were accused of adultery. In their investigation announcements, the commission said such behavior “violated socialist ethics.”
The Beijing Times reported this week that since the end of 2012, about 20 percent of 241 purged officials, or 48 officials, also had “improper sexual relationships.” Of these 48, 19 were accused of adultery and 14 had at least three mistresses.
Wang Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, was quoted in the article as saying: “Since the 18th Party Congress, adultery and improper sexual relationships are no longer simply a lifestyle issue, but have become important elements in the anticorruption” drive.
Zhang Shuguang, former deputy chief engineer of the Ministry of Railways, was charged last year with taking bribes amounting to about 47 million renminbi, or $8 million. At his trial, Mr. Zhang testified that his expenses skyrocketed when he became involved with Luo Fei, his mistress. Ms. Luo admitted at her own trial that she had helped Mr. Zhang hide some of his embezzled money.