The railway minister of China, Liu Zhijun, has been removed from the top post in the ministry because he is being investigated for corruption, according to a report on Saturday by Xinhua, the state news agency. Mr. Liu is the most senior Chinese official to come under such investigation in years.
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China’s Railway Minister Loses Post in Corruption Inquiry
By EDWARD WONG
13 February 2011
The railway minister of China, Liu Zhijun, has been removed from the top post in the ministry because he is being investigated for corruption, according to a report on Saturday by Xinhua, the state news agency. Mr. Liu is the most senior Chinese official to come under such investigation in years.
The inquiry raises questions about China’s deep investment in high-speed railways, a vast nationwide initiative that has been a favorite project of Mr. Liu, who has spent his entire career in the ministry.
Mr. Liu, 58, is being investigated for “severe violation of discipline,” according to the Xinhua report, which cited the Communist Party’s discipline watchdog. The report did not give details on the exact infractions.
Before Mr. Liu, perhaps the most prominent official to be felled on corruption charges was Chen Liangyu, the party boss of Shanghai and an ally of Jiang Zemin, the former president of China; Mr. Chen was dismissed from his Shanghai post in 2006 and sentenced in 2008 to 18 years in prison.
Mr. Liu’s family has been dogged by charges of abuse of power. In April 2006, Mr. Liu’s younger brother, Liu Zhixiang, was given a suspended death sentence by a court in Hubei Province for hiring people to kill a man who had revealed that he was a corrupt official. The brother, who was the head of the railways bureau in the city of Wuhan, was also convicted of taking bribes and embezzling public funds and property worth more than $5 million over a nine-year period.
The elder Mr. Liu had been in his job since 2003. Mr. Liu has been removed from the post of party chief, the most senior position in the ministry, and temporarily replaced with Sheng Guangzu, 62, head of the general administration of customs, Xinhua reported.
According to an official biography, Mr. Liu was born in Hubei Province in 1953 and joined the Communist Party at age 20. He graduated from the Party School in 1998 after majoring in Marxist philosophy. He served separate stints as director of the railway bureaus in Henan Province and Liaoning Province before moving into the central railway bureaucracy in Beijing.
A total of 146,517 officials were punished for disciplinary violations in 2010, Xinhua reported. Of those, 5,098 were officials at the county level or above, and 804 of them were prosecuted.
The railway ministry employs 2.5 million people across China and commands a vast budget. The largest annual mass movement of people in the world takes place on Chinese trains during the Lunar New Year holiday, when people all across the country return home to reunite with their families. But this is also the time when corruption in the railway industry becomes the most obvious — large numbers of tickets somehow end up in the hands of scalpers, and some people are forced to pay well above the original price to go home.
Mr. Liu personally championed the explosion in high-speed rail construction, the scale of which has overshadowed all such projects in the United States. In September 2009, Zhang Shuguang, the deputy chief engineer of the railway ministry, said in a speech that the government planned 42 lines by 2012, with 5,000 miles of track for passenger trains that travel at 215 miles per hour and 3,000 miles of track for passenger and fast freight trains traveling at 155 miles per hour. But with the slowdown of the stimulus money that the government announced in 2008 to combat the effects of the global financial crisis, some high-speed lines might not be finished until 2013 or 2014, transportation experts say.
The most impressive operational line is the one from the southern provincial capital of Guangzhou to the interior metropolis of Wuhan. The train has the world’s fastest average speed, traversing 664 miles in a little over three hours.
Discipline probe of railways minister
Liu Zhijun sacked from party post
Toh Han Shih
13 February 2011
Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun, in charge of the mainland’s multitrillion-yuan high-speed rail programme, is being investigated for “severe violation of discipline”, Xinhua reported last night.
Xinhua said Liu had been removed as the ministry’s Communist Party secretary. However, it is not known whether he has also been stripped of his ministerial post.
He may not be the only railways official under investigation. The section on the ministry’s website about its leadership was deleted yesterday.
And an official from the ministry, who refused to be named, said changes were looming there.
“There will be some changes in personnel ... This will definitely have an impact on the ministry and China’s railway development, but normal operations should not be affected,” the official said.
Liu, 58, is the first cabinet minister to be felled by disciplinary problems since the then minister of land and resources, Tian Fengshan, in 2003.
Beijing-based news website Caing.com said Liu’s fall from grace was directly linked to a government investigation of high-profile businesswoman Ding Shumiao. Ding, from Shanxi, was taken away by investigators in Beijing last month. Her firm Broad Union Group won lucrative contracts for work on railways including the high-speed line from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, the website reported. Railway projects were the prime focus of the investigation of Ding, it said.
The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection did not disclose details of Liu’s case.
A Hong Kong transport consultant familiar with mainland railway development said: “The railways ministry is very powerful. It controls a lot of resources ... There are plenty of opportunities for corruption.”
A US venture capital investor with extensive dealings on the mainland said: “The Ministry of Railways has grown too powerful. [It] controls all the property around the train stations. Railroad property prices are going up like crazy.
“Many people in the central government want to remove Liu because he resists reforming the ministry.”
Liu has faced criticism for years for chaotic management of the ministry, which he has run since 2003.
In 2006, his younger brother, Liu Zhixiang, received a suspended death sentence for hiring a hitman to kill someone who publicly accused him of being corrupt and embezzling public funds.
The ministry is charged with realising the mainland’s high-speed-railway ambitions. Beijing aims to expand the network to 25,000 kilometres by 2015 at a cost of 3.5 trillion yuan (HK$4.1 trillion).
China already has the world’s longest high-speed rail network, at over 8,000 kilometres. It is expected to spend 700 billion yuan on rail projects this year, the same as last year. Despite questions over the huge expense of the project, the central government has given it top priority.
An international consultant based in Shanghai who specialises in infrastructure said: “Given that so much money has been spent, [Liu’s case] is serious news that will send shockwaves around the world. It’s detrimental for China’s image internationally. The world is looking to China to develop and sell high-speed rail. Now the guy heading it has been sacked for corruption.”
Additional reporting by Minnie Chan
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