The cadre who took too much

IT IS A STEAMY August night and the 51-year-old vice-governor of Jiangxi province is missing. Called on his mobile, Hu Changqing insists he is in Shenzhen, but a police trace of the call finds he is in Guangzhou.

At four in the morning, police break into room 1430 in the city's China Hotel and find Hu sound asleep in bed, his breath reeking of alcohol. They find two unused Motorola mobile telephones, a fake identity card, two packets each containing 10,000 yuan (about HK$9,400) and a bottle of Viagra.

It is August 8, 1999, and the start of a legal process that would lead to Hu's execution on March 8 last year, making him the second most senior official to be executed since the Communists came to power in 1949. He was executed for taking 5.52 million yuan in bribes and having assets of 1.61 million yuan which he could not explain.

A book tracing Hu's tragic life appeared last month entitled The Vice-Governor on His Way to the Execution Ground written by Zhou Wei, a reporter with Jiangxi television station, and produced by the Masses Publishing Company in Beijing.

Hu was one of 132,000 Communist Party officials punished last year, an increase of 6.5 per cent on 1999, including 17 of ministerial rank. Beijing chose to execute him to show the public its determination to fight corruption and because his abuses of power were particularly shocking in a poor province with 41 million people and an average rural income of less than 200 yuan a month.

Until his appointment as vice-governor of Jiangxi on August 15, 1995, Hu had been a competent and hard-working official, serving 11 years in the People's Liberation Army and working in Beijing in the People's Insurance Company, the National Tax Bureau and the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

But his life changed after he installed himself on the 12th floor of the Ganjiang hotel in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, the apartment he made his home because he left his wife and two children behind in Beijing.

He started life modestly, taking meals with two dishes and a soup in the hotel restaurant, until he was introduced to private businessmen who needed favours from within the Government. They invited him to the city's most expensive restaurants, bowling alleys, saunas and nightclubs and started to give him cash, goods and women in return for favours.

He took the bribes from seven of these businessmen, including 3.2 million yuan - 58 per cent of his total haul - from Zhou Xuehua, the 27-year-old owner of a large hotel and 13 taxi, car-leasing and transport companies.

'Whether I did him a small favour, provided women or gave him a huge amount of money, Hu never refused,' Zhou told prosecutors after his arrest. 'He loved to boast. After taking a large bribe, he told me not to look at the money but to wait until he became a very high official. With his help, he said, I could become a billionaire.'

Zhou instigated many of Hu's corrupt deeds.

On the weekend of August 16, 1997, Zhou and his mistress paid for Hu to fly with them to Guangzhou, where they hired a taxi to take them to Zhuhai where a prostitute was lined up for Hu.

Using fake passports to conceal the identity of such a high official, the two couples went to Macau and spent the night in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Lisboa. The next morning, Hu expressed interest in a Rolex watch on sale in a nearby shop and Zhou bought it for him for HK$120,000. They walked down the street and Zhou spent a further $30,000 on Hu, buying him a platinum and diamond ring, and a gold diamond-studded bracelet.

To save Hu the trouble of going to Macau, Zhou also arranged for prostitutes to fly from Zhuhai to spend the night with him in Nanchang. He gave them the plane tickets and up to 5,000 yuan spending money. When Hu complained that one of the prostitutes - in her 30s - was too old, Zhou flew a 24-year-old university graduate who was more to Hu's liking.

Zhou also supplied Hu with Viagra bought from Hong Kong. Hu found it so effective that Zhou had to give him the use of his own villa, because the arrival of so many women at Hu's hotel room became an embarrassment.

But Hu was not satisfied. He took a mistress, also named Hu, a woman 20 years his junior, who had divorced her husband after he was convicted of rape and who had a two-year-old son.

He was besotted and lavished more than one million yuan on her, a fifth of his illegal earnings. Gifts included gold, cash, jewellery, a piano, jobs at state companies where she did not have to go to work and an apartment, which he obtained for nothing by abusing his influential connections.

When a Nanchang real-estate firm wanted to buy five hectares of land on the outskirts of the city, Hu intervened on its behalf and ordered the local government to slash the price, saving the firm 3.2 million yuan. In exchange, the firm gave Hu a two-bedroom apartment which he passed on to his mistress.

When Hu was arranging a posting to Beijing in early 1999, he arranged a job for Ms Hu in Guangzhou and bought an expensive apartment for her in the city's Tianhe district.

Despite all Hu did for her, this is what Ms Hu told investigators after his arrest: 'He did not behave like an official, let alone a high official. I looked down on him. When I was with him, I only thought of the money.'

Hu rewarded his donors with help in gaining approval for their projects, especially permits for new companies, acquisition of land and real-estate deals, either through his power as vice-governor or through his web of connections built up over the nine years he worked in Beijing.

He would have got away with it but for one mistake - a favour for his ungrateful mistress.

By the end of 1998, he became nervous and decided to move back to Beijing. In January 1999, he met an official well placed in the central Government and gave him 10,000 yuan to arrange a comfortable position for him in the capital.

By August, the transfer was fixed, but he had one more major duty to perform - opening the Jiangxi pavilion at the World Flower Expo in the southwestern city of Kunming. After doing this and attending a meeting on the morning of August 7, he disappeared.

Later that day, the provincial leaders of Kunming looked for Hu but he could not be found. His secretary called him on his mobile phone and he said he was in Shenzhen on private business. So officials were sent to Shenzhen airport to check the passenger lists but found no record of Hu's name.

Had he been kidnapped? Was he trying to flee the country? In fact, he was in Guangzhou fixing up a job for his mistress. That evening, he attended a banquet, became very drunk and returned with difficulty to the China Hotel. After midnight, when the Jiangxi governor called him on his mobile, he mumbled a few words, switched it off and went to sleep.

Police traced the signal and guessed he would be staying at the China Hotel. At the request of the Jiangxi governor, they went to the hotel, found the assumed name he was using and detained him at 4am on August 8. They flew with him to Beijing that day for an interrogation.

His mobile phone proved the vital piece of evidence. His wife in Beijing called to find out where he was and his mistress called to ask if he had arranged the job for her in Guangzhou.

Tipped off by an anonymous call on August 9 that her husband was in trouble, his wife went to a bank branch in Beijing the next morning to withdraw 500,000 yuan in preparation for fleeing the country. Told that the bank did not have so much cash, she was asked to come back that afternoon. The bank tipped off the authorities and she was detained upon her return.

Hu was shot by firing squad at 8.46am on March 8 last year on an execution ground in a northern suburb of Nanchang. The Supreme Court had ordered death by lethal injection but Jiangxi province officials said they did not have the equipment or experience to carry this out.

He left behind his wife, a 24-year-old son and a daughter in her first year at university. His wife was dismissed from her job in the education bureau at the head office of the Industrial and Commercial Bank in Beijing for grave breaches of discipline.

He also left a 95-year-old mother with bound feet who brought him into the world in 1948 in a poor mountain village outside Changde, Hunan province, the youngest of five children.

The family lived in dire poverty and his father died of hunger during the Great Famine of 1959-61 which led to the deaths of between 20 and 44 million Chinese. With no grain to eat, Hu's father had lived on tree bark and wild vegetation.

Hu was a model student, walking five kilometres a day to school with his feet sticking out of his worn shoes. Unable to attend university because of the Cultural Revolution, he joined the PLA in 1968 and served with distinction in the Air Force Engineering Corps, building airports in the northwest.

He left the PLA in 1979 and graduated from the Chinese department of Hunan Teachers College in 1985, moving to Beijing the next year. He was on his way - all the way to the execution ground and a bullet in the back of his head.

Mark O'Neill is a member of the Post's Beijing bureau