Nowadays, many officials committing briberies in China choose to flee to other countries to avoid the legal punishment. Those fleeing officials cause not only great financial losses but also damages to reigning foundation of China’s government.
It is not rare that the corrupt officials in China flee to other countries. It is said that most of them are not punished and live comfortable and happy lives in foreign countries. Many people raise that problem which pushes China’s government into an embarrassing situation.
In the middle of November, the party secretary of a district in Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province suddenly went “missing” when he and other officials were making an investigation in Paris. Later a rumor was spread out, saying that an official of Luwan District, Shanghai rejected to return to China after the investigation in Paris.
According to the experts, the two above-mentioned officials’ actions, though not proven, can be called “disguised fleeing”. From the above depiction, we can see that both officials’ fleeing is the same in “where” and “how”. They made use of the government-sponsored investigations in foreign countries and went “missing” after the investigations. It is said that some officials even sent their families abroad before their fleeing. Why could those corrupt officials succeed in fleeing? By now China’s government is not able to give out definite replies.
What’s worse is that it is, according to the experts, only the start of the period in which more corrupt officials will choose to flee to foreign countries.
Indefinite Number, Unsure Amount
There is still no uniform statement about how many corrupt officials in China have fled to foreign countries and how much money they brought abroad. For the government and media, it is really a “Mission Impossible”.
From 1985 to 1995 the amount of flight capital in China took over 50% of the increase of the foreign debt. This made China become the country with the fourth largest amount of flight capital while the top three were Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina.
But after 2000, things became different. In 2003, a magazine under the Xinhua News Agency which is the official news agency in China released the data saying that by then there were 4000 corrupt officials in China fleeing abroad with more than 5 billion US dollars. In May 2004, the Ministry of Public Security of the PRC held a press release in which its spokesman said that there were 500 fleeing officials in foreign countries and they took away about 70 billion yuan (USD 10 billion). However, 3 months later, the data released by the Ministry of Commerce of the PRC showed that there were 4000 China’s corrupt officials in foreign countries and the amount of money embezzled by them reached 50 billion US dollars. The data were diversified. What was worse was that they all came from official department or media. This really confused the public and they did not know which one to believe.
However, no matter what the correct number or amount is, the problem of the fled corrupt is too serious to be neglected. “China’s government,” said one of the experts, “must pay great attention to that problem.”
The Routine of the Fleeing Officials
Liu Yanji, a professor from China University of Politics and Law, said: “The Cheng Kejie Case (Cheng Kejie was the former head of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and was sentenced to death in 2000 for taking huge bribery) is the watershed of China’s corrupt officials’ fleeing. So far as I know, the phenomenon that many corrupt officials in China flee abroad just started in 2000 after the Cheng Kejie Case.”
Actually, since the 1980s, some China’s corrupt officials considered fleeing abroad as their best way to avoid legal punishment. Due to some political reasons, the western countries which the corrupt officials fled to usually don’t extradite those criminals. So the western countries became the paradise for those corrupt officials from China because they usually brought a lot of money they illegally embezzled. The more high-ranking the officials are, the more dirty money they embezzle and the better lives they live in the foreign countries.
According to Li Guangsen, an author having studied the fleeing corrupt officials in China for a long time, there is a fixed pattern for those corrupt officials to flee abroad. The schedule is like this: transfer of their assets, advanced setoff of families, preparation for passport, embezzlement of a lot of money, going abroad after/without resignation, hiding in a foreign country and getting the residence permit and ID card of that country. Such a process usually takes one year. Some of them even make use of their social network to setup their own companies in the foreign countries so that they can run the company in the name of president or CEO after they settled in the foreign countries.
During that process of getting the passport is the most important. If the corrupt officials can not get their passports, they will not be able to leave China. However, most of the fleeing officials have no difficulties in that link. Some of them even have more than one passport with different names. Those passports are not bogus but issued by the relevant authorities. The corrupt officials, using their power and money, force or tempt the relevant people to help with their passports.
Four Directions of Fleeing
There are basically four directions of fleeing corrupt officials. The low-ranking officials having no opportunities to embezzle a lot of money usually choose some countries around China as their destinations of fleeing, such as Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Russia. Those high-ranking officials who embezzle lots of money usually choose to flee to the USA, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and some other developed countries. For those who fail to get the license to those developed countries, the African, Latin American and East European countries with incomplete legal systems are temporary asylums where they can wait for the opportunities to settle down in those developed countries. Besides, a certain number of people choose Hong Kong as a “transfer station” because Hong Kong is the center of the world aviation and Hong Kong residence can enjoy the convenience in visa for the members of British Commonwealth of Nations. Among them, quite a large number of corrupt officials choose to flee to the USA.
According to a Chinese newspaper issued in the USA, the house prices of some large cities in the USA and Canada once had crazy increase. One of the main reasons was the great demand of Chinese living in those cities. According to the report, those Chinese were so rich that they bought those millions-of-dollar luxury houses by cash in a lump sum. That shocked the Americans who could afford the houses by hard work in addition to loans. How many of those rich Chinese were the fleeing corrupt officials? We don’t know, but we are sure that the number is not small.
Serious Problems for China’s Government
Undoubtedly, the fled corrupt officials have become a thorny problem for China’s central government. The money, though huge in the amount, is not the most serious problem. The damages to reigning foundation as well as the trust of civilians in the government are really what they care about. The anti-embezzlement departments of China have no way to deal with that situation. The corrupt officials who embezzle huge amount of money and then flee to foreign countries can still live comfortably and happily without being punished. This really raises the antipathy of the public against the government to some extent.
Presently, there are three ways of China’s government to deal with the fled officials: extradition, arrestment by the International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO) and the regional juristic cooperation with other countries. However, there are only about 20 countries having signed the extradition treaty. Furthermore, China’s central government usually can not provide detailed information about the fled officials’ hiding places, making it hard for the ICPO to arrest them. How to deal with those problems effectively and properly is a problem that must be solved.
