The People's Republic Of Graft

A corruption case in China sheds rare light on the nexus between business elites and officials at the highest level, with the trail leading to the doorstep of a former prime minister

- Ananth Krishnan

On a recent evening, the lobby at the Bulgari Hotel, a luxurious new glass and steel building that sits in the heart of Beijing on the banks of the Liangma river, was bustling with activity. The latest addition to Beijing’s growing list of elite luxury hotels was launched last September, backed by one of the Chinese capital’s most influential—and richest—power players.

Over the past decade, everything that 51-year-old billionaire businesswoman Duan Weihong touched seemed to turn to gold, as she acquired a vast portfolio of prime properties across Beijing through her Great Ocean Group, or Taihong. Duan’s close relations with the Communist Party of China (CPC) elite was an open secret but never fully detailed, part of the opaque business-politics nexus that greases the wheels of the Chinese economy.

Then out of the blue, Duan disappeared. She was missing at the September unveiling of the Bulgari Hotel. Two months earlier, CPC politburo member Sun Zhengcai—the party chief of Chongqing who was widely seen as a potential long-term successor to President Xi Jinping—had been removed from his post by Xi. Sun, incidentally, was like Duan a Tianjin native and later served as the party boss of the Beijing district of Shunyi at the time when Duan’s real estate business had expanded to the Chinese capital and acquired vast tracts of land in the same district.