I recently exchanged a couple of emails with a close friend and business partner over some latest happenings in China.
It all began with my friend forwarding to me a widely circulated piece (author unknown) depicting how a condo building in Shanghai toppled and fell to the ground in June of 2009.
Inevitably I brought up the building fire that killed dozens of people in November of 2010, also in Shanghai! I then went on to try to connect the dots…
I thought it would be self-explanatory enough to just show the emails themselves to illustrate my point. So here we go:
First, the piece my friend forwarded to me:
In response, I brought up the building fire incident just weeks before:
Did you hear about the latest building fire in Shanghai that killed dozens of people? Folks could no longer talk about it with a tongue in cheek like the way they did with this building collapse (where purportedly no one was killed).
Sooner or later all the problems in China will get more “impactful” and “fiery”.
To which he answered: “Yes, I did hear about fire but need your insights.”
To which I replied:
In mid-November the Deputy Director of the Shanghai Housing Bureau was officially arrested on corruption charges. One of the charges had something to do with his taking bribes from the developer responsible for the collapsed building.
He in fact has been offering bribes to superiors and taking bribes from developers for years. Many of these developers used to be government officials themselves. He and the developer responsible for the collapsed building in fact came from the same county. A few of those developers had fled overseas as soon as they heard that he was under investigation. One of them fled to Singapore, but has recently returned thinking the fiasco was over. He was put under house arrest a week after the arrest of the Deputy Director.
BTW, don’t think that this was an isolated event. It happens in China every day. Multiple times.
The reason the above case was picked up by the media was simply because this happened in Shanghai, supposedly the most transparent and orderly place in China, and that the collapsed building still commands a long-lasting “impact” and thus attention in the society.
And more importantly, don’t think that the rest of the Housing Bureau staff is clean. Remember the developer who came back from Singapore thinking that the same-old, routine, once-in-a-while anti-correction shakeup was over and it was going to be business as usual and then got caught. He might have very well been right – likely from experience and possibly also advised (unfortunately this time he was ill-advised) by insiders – that is, if the building fire had not happened (on November 15, namely, mid-November) which apparently put the “heat” back on these sort of things in Shanghai again.
Likewise, don’t think that any of the government officials who are not behind bars are any better than their kind who are.
Most importantly, don’t think that there is a special breed of people in China that will behave differently than the rest of them when put in the same shoe.
It is the system.
To which he exclaimed: “Really scary!!! Thanks for the insights.“
