|
 |  | |
|
|
about Asia Buzz
Asia Buzz: Festering Sore
How corruption affects the little man--or woman
By TERRY McCARTHY
May
17, 2000
Web posted at 2:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 2:00 a.m. EDT
Corruption is such a wonderfully fertile topic in China: like streptococcus, it festers everywhere, and affects--or infects--almost everyone. And even when corruption is not, apparently, present, people's first instinct is to look for it anyway. This happened last week with the revelation that China's foreign exchange czar, Li Fuxiang, a man of lily-white reputation who had competently overseen and managed China's $150 billion in foreign reserves, had jumped to his death from a hospital window in Beijing.
|
|
 ASIA BUZZ
|
Asia Buzz: Last Supper
The Asian Internet boom runs the risk of being over before it really began
- Tuesday,
May 16, 2000
Asia Buzz: Sex in Japan
Warning: this article may offend me
- Monday,
May 15, 2000
Letter from Japan: Can of Worms
I'll say it again: There is a real racist vein in Japanese culture
- Friday,
May 12, 2000
Asia Buzz: Tie Me Up
The humble neck tie is in crisis, just thank the New Economy
- Thursday,
May 11, 2000
Asia
Buzz: Rubbery Figures
The Net world is just full of them
- Tuesday,
May 9, 2000
Asia Buzz: Virus Alert
Do not read this article!
- Monday,
May 8, 2000
|
|
 ASIAWEEK
|
|
|
"Jumped or pushed?" was the first question that buzzed around the foreign media in China. The domestic media, of course, was not allowed to print anything about the matter (see Censorship in China, a previous column in this series), so they threw no light on the matter. Then speculation shifted to what he had been getting up to--links with disgraced businessmen, favors to former colleagues--the rumor mill was in high gear. Nobody could find anything, but, well, there had to be something, didn't there? This was China after all and here was a senior official who had committed suicide. He had to be covering something up.
|
INTERACTIVE |
|
Ticked off at Asia Buzz? Turned on? Talk back to
TIME
|
|
Of course, we may discover in due course that Li was indeed trading Japanese yen futures for fun with a couple of billion each night after dinner on his laptop, but so far there is no reason to think he wasn't just depressed. He lives in Beijing, after all, and the skies there are dark half the year, just like in northern Scandinavia, an area also known for depression and high suicide rates. Except in Beijing the dark skies are not from proximity to the Arctic circle, but courtesy of Capital Steel (the largest state run enterprise in China), thoughtfully built upwind of the capital.
Anyway, the real subject of this column is how corruption can affect the little man--or woman in this case, who has less than $150 in her account, and not much chance of getting into the papers if she were to choose to jump from the seventh story of a hospital, for whatever reason.
The woman in question, Chen Fanguar, lives in Shanghai, but was born in Sichuan and has had several jobs around the country, mostly in the hotel business. Along the way she has picked up quite good English, and has always wanted to travel overseas to see what life is like outside China.
Earlier this year, her current employer, an international catering company, agreed to sponsor a visa for her to go to Europe to visit their headquarters in Amsterdam. All she needed was a passport. And being a citizen of the People's Republic of China, she was automatically entitled to a Chinese passport, right?
Wrong. When Chen went to apply for a passport, she was told she had to go back to Sichuan to get her application endorsed by the local government office in the town where she was born. Furthermore, she needed to find out where her "dossier" had got to. This is a running document of education and employment history that is passed from school to work unit and is kept updated with the individual's record--and any criminal or other problems he or she might have got into. The individual never sees his or her own dossier--but it is supposedly meant to shadow you all your life, as it passes hands from one work unit to the next.
Chen's dossier had apparently been mislaid while she was working for a hotel in the south, but she did not know this until she was told so by the police. The implication was that it could be found for a "search fee". No sum was mentioned, and anyway, Chen was on her way to Sichuan, hoping she could at least get the necessary endorsement there.
No, said the local official. What right did she, a lowly restaurant worker, have to own a passport? Even the official himself had never traveled overseas. But she persevered. Finally a sum was mentioned--it was going to cost her 80,000 renmimbi ($9,600) "processing fee" to get her application stamped. This was before the "search fee" for her dossier. Chen gets paid 2,000 renmimbi ($240) a month. Didn't she have some rich foreigner who could give her the money, sneered the official?
Chen is now back in Shanghai, with no passport, and no recourse. She is not planning to jump from the seventh floor of a hospital. But you can see why someone else might.
Ticked off at Asia Buzz? Turned on? Talk back to TIME
Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com
Search for recent Asia Buzz
TIME Asia home
|
|
LATEST HEADLINES:
|
Click Here for the latest regional analysis from TIME Asia
|
|
|
