Winning funds and influencing people: how one Chinese cadre revealed the unwritten rules of gaining Beijing’s favour

It didn’t take long for Gong Wenmi to go from a ­tireless cadre lobbying Beijing on behalf of his city to an official trying to manipulate holes in a state-led system.

Gong, the Communist Party chief of Shaoyang in Hunan province, made the front page of the official Shaoyang Daily on Monday after his whirlwind, four-day trip to the capital last week to try to get more state funds flowing to his city.

In detailing his efforts, the report shed light on the unwritten but essential rules to winning funds and influencing people in the corridors of the mainland’s political and economic power. It revealed the key roles that retired senior officials and cadres with links to the region can have in influencing, or even deciding, the distribution of public funds and investment.

These are just the types of lobbying games that Beijing has publicly sought to stamp out, and soon enough, the cheerleading stories were pulled from the websites of the paper and the city government as such reports can be deeply embarrassing for the Beijing officials involved.

Shaoyang is one of the country’s many economic backwaters. It’s a largely rural administrative area of 8 million residents with a per capita income usually about 60 per cent of the national average, despite clocking 9.6 per cent growth last year.

As such, Gong, the newly appointed Communist Party secretary, has been working hard trying to get new construction projects, roads, railways and even an airport in his region. Beijing is key to getting these kinds of projects funded and approved, and officials from lower-level authorities regularly “run to the ministries to ask for money”, seeking to gain more favour for the administrative areas.