Original title: The case of Zhou Jiangyong is disclosed for the first time: the two brothers, the two systems of government and business, will not return if they work together
Use power as a tool in exchange for capital
Five months following he was sacked, Zhou Jiangyong made his first public appearance. On January 19, the fifth episode of the anti-corruption feature film “Zero Tolerance”, “Always on the Road”, was broadcast. Zhou Jiangyong, former member of the Standing Committee of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee and former secretary of the Hangzhou Municipal Party Committee, appeared on the scene to repent.
Facing the camera, Zhou Jiangyong said, “I reflect on myself, my ideals and beliefs can’t be shaken, and I can’t forget the original intention. This is a long-awaited alarm bell. This is a lesson from my blood.”
Two brothers of the Zhou family, two systems of government and business
The brothers Zhou Jiangyong and Zhou Jianyong have “two systems in one family”, one in politics and the other in business.
Zhou Jiangyong had a bright future. He was born in September 1967 in Ningbo, Zhejiang. He worked as a middle school teacher. After entering the official career, he worked in Ningbo and Zhoushan for a long time. He was in charge of Wenzhou and Hangzhou successively.
He was not yet 50 years old when he was promoted from the secretary of the Wenzhou Municipal Party Committee to the Standing Committee of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee. In May 2018, he served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee and the Secretary of the Hangzhou Municipal Party Committee. He was sacked in August last year.
Zhou Jiangyong’s younger brother Zhou Jianyong also has a good future. Zhou Jianyong is a teacher at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. But Zhou Jianyong has neither capital nor technology, how can he become a successful person in the business world?
Zhou Jianyong’s secret is to rely on his brother. In 2006, he started a business part-time, and the location was chosen in Xiangshan County, Ningbo. At that time, Zhou Jiangyong was the secretary of the Xiangshan County Party Committee. The future fate of the two was thus intertwined, and the root of the disaster was laid.
As you can see in the feature film, Zhou Jianyong said, “I want to start a company because of Zhou Jiangyong and he has this power, so I found Zhou Jiangyong. In fact, from this day on, I was destined to have a relationship with him.”
Zhou Jiangyong said, “My younger brother wants to run a business, and introduce him to a company to cooperate with. It’s because I took the lead, and then slowly… This is the root of the curse.”
Zhou Jiangyong found a local private enterprise in Xiangshan to provide capital, land and equipment, and Zhou Jianyong produced the so-called technology. This private enterprise and Zhou Jianyong “cooperated” to establish Ningbo Xiangrun Petrochemical Technology Co., Ltd.
In fact, “cooperation” is a pretense. The company soon became Zhou Jianyong’s independent contractor, but the land, plant and equipment of this private enterprise were used free of charge for a long time. The company provided more than 7 million benefits to the Zhou brothers by waiving lease fees.
In return, Zhou Jiangyong used his power to help the company in acquiring land and other aspects. In this way, the two have the first pot of gold, the first pot of gold from power and money trading.
Join hands to expand the business territory, the younger brother acts as a “power broker”
With the blessing of power and business capital, the Zhou brothers joined forces to expand the business territory.
Zhou Jianyong and fellow countryman Zhou Wenyong “cooperated” to establish Yongrun Petrochemical Technology Co., Ltd. Although Zhou Jianyong holds 40% of the shares, in fact, the total amount of registered capital and capital increase payable by him is more than 14 million yuan, all of which are paid by Zhou Wenyong.
These bosses hope to spend a lot of money to “cooperate” with Zhou Jianyong, so that they can cling to Zhou Jiangyong. Zhou Jianyong also promised Zhou Wenyong, “If something happens in the future, Zhou Jiangyong will also help.”
Later, Zhou Jiangyong really helped. In 2014, in order to save costs, Yongrun Company illegally handed the waste residue following oil refining to an unqualified company for “treatment”, and the treatment method turned out to be transported to Shandong and dumped in farmland.
The Shandong police filed a case for investigation, but Zhou Jiangyong interfered with the judicial system, grabbed the jurisdiction of the case, and asked the local Ningbo police to file a case for investigation. In the end, big things become small and small things become small.
In the process of expanding the business territory, Zhou Jianyong actually acted as a power broker. Shi Shihong, the owner of a construction company, took the initiative to get acquainted with Zhou Jianyong. Zhou Jianyong helped Shi Shihong to contract the project through Zhou Jiangyong.
The two brothers of the Zhou family jointly accepted huge bribes and invested in the family business as capital. From 2013 to 2017, Zhou Jiangyong helped Shi Shihong in various projects, and Zhou Jianyong received more than 90 million yuan from Shi Shihong in the name of “borrowing” eight times.
Facing the camera, Zhou Jianyong admitted, “To be honest, I have to admit that I don’t want to pay it back either.” Zhou Jiangyong said, “Without my power, he (Zhou Jianyong) is nothing.”
It was mentioned in the feature film that Zhou Jiangyong and Shi Shihong never contacted each other, and they used their younger brother as a bridge. He thought that setting up a “firewall” in this way might avoid supervision.
In the era of the digital economy, the Zhou brothers’ means of expanding their business territory have also kept pace with the times. In 2017, Zhou Jianyong co-founded Youcheng United Information Technology Development Co., Ltd. in Ningbo and Renren, claiming to be a high-tech company focusing on “Metro Internet +”.
With the help of Zhou Jiangyong once more, U-City United cooperated with Ningbo Metro, and the company obtained the coordination right of Ningbo Metro’s mobile payment system for the first business. Zhou Jiangyong said, “I said hello to this.”
After Zhou Jiangyong was transferred as secretary of the Wenzhou Municipal Party Committee, Youcheng United won part of the project of the Wenzhou Metro Mobile Payment System. After Zhou Jiangyong was transferred to Hangzhou, the company invested in the establishment of Hangtie Youcheng Technology Co., Ltd., intending to expand its business in Hangzhou.
Zhou Jiangyong worked in the background, Zhou Jianyong made friends with various bosses at the front desk, selling high-tech on the surface, but actually selling power. Some bosses also hope to bind Zhou Jiangyong through Zhou Jianyong and acquire part of the equity of Zhou Jianyong’s company at an obviously unreasonable high price.
Expert: Fill in loopholes and avoid deliberately avoiding regulations
Facing the camera, Zhou Jiangyong repented and said, “From my case, I have committed serious mistakes and crimes, and I am deeply remorseful. This is really, really painful.”
Judging from the content revealed by the feature film, Zhou Jiangyong wanted to be both an official and to make a fortune, but he failed to correctly treat the relationship between government and business, and his family style was not right. Zhou Jiangyong, who came from a farm family, should have cherished his career opportunities, but he gradually deviates from his original intention.
When he was in power in Hangzhou, Zhou Jiangyong once publicly said that being able to work in such an era and such a city is the supreme honor of each of our cadres, and it is also a major test for each of our cadres. “Obviously, he failed the test.
Zhou Jiangyong also told his subordinates that when the times abandoned you, he would not even say “goodbye”. Now this sentence has become an irony to him.
In addition, the problems exposed by the Zhou Jiangyong case are also worthy of attention. That is, are officials’ spouses, children and other collateral family members allowed to do business, and how to avoid similar phenomena?
The commentary of the feature film mentioned that Zhejiang is an active market economy area, and some leading cadres have the problem of “one family, two systems”. After the fall of Zhou Jiangyong, Hangzhou officials carried out special governance on the prominent problems affecting the relationship between the pro-Qing government and business.
Peng Xinlin, an anti-corruption expert and a researcher at the G20 Anti-Corruption, Fleeing and Asset Recovery Research Center, told China News Weekly that in recent years, a string of family-style corruption has emerged due to the investigation and punishment of a case. Corrupt elements and family members and friends have joined forces to plan and commit crimes, which makes it increasingly difficult to discover, break through, and deal with corruption in the fight once morest corruption.
In Peng Xinlin’s view, it is precisely because Zhou Jiangyong’s family style is not upright that he is engaged in the activities of “one person gets the way, chickens and dogs rise to the sky”, “the front door becomes an official, and the back door opens a store”, which makes the principle flexible in the face of family affection and the bottom line is lost in the world of people. The family brothers became a community of interests and used power as a tool to exchange capital, and eventually fell into the abyss of corruption and ruined their reputations.
Peng Xinlin said that it is understandable that officials, family members and friends who run politics or do business are originally personal choices. However, if officials still have to look following the country following entering politics, and use their power to help family relatives and friends to make profits and engage in power and money transactions, this is an abuse of power and a destruction of the system.
Yang Zhiyun, an associate professor at the Department of Public Administration at the University of Science and Technology Beijing, told China News Weekly that, in fact, there are relevant official regulations regarding the business affairs of officials’ spouses and children. For example, the “Specific Provisions on the Individuals of the Provincial and Prefectural Party Committees and the Spouses and Children of the Leading Officials of the Government Doing Business and Running Enterprises (Trial)”.
To put it simply, the document stipulates that the spouses and children of leading cadres at the provincial (autonomous region, municipality) and prefecture (city) levels shall not engage in real estate development, business, agency, publishing, or establishment of real estate in the areas where the leading cadres serve. Law firm, employed as a lawyer, engaged in many business activities such as commercial karaoke halls, dance halls, night clubs and other entertainment industries. That is to say, officials’ spouses and children can do business, but they are not allowed to do business in the areas where the relevant leaders work, nor are they allowed to engage in the above-mentioned business activities.
The website of the Supervision Department of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection mentioned that from 1984 to 2016, there were more than 20 regulations issued by the central government involving “prohibiting officials and their relatives from doing business.” Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the regulations on the business of officials’ spouses and children have become more and more strict.
In 2016, the 23rd meeting of the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms reviewed and approved the regulations of Beijing, Guangdong Province, Chongqing City, and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on further regulating the behavior of leading cadres’ spouses, children and their spouses in running businesses (for trial implementation) , to further standardize the behavior of leading cadres’ spouses, children and their spouses to do business and run enterprises.
The relevant documents of the five provinces and cities have similar characteristics. The higher the level, the stricter the requirements. The spouses of provincial (municipal) leading cadres are not allowed to do business, and their children and their spouses are not allowed to do business in the province (city).
Judging from the above documents, except for officials’ spouses, children and spouses, the policy documents do not make clear restrictions on the business activities of other close relatives of officials.
Peng Xinlin believes that although the document does not clearly stipulate that officials’ collateral relatives (brothers and sisters belong to collateral) do business, but since the party has been strictly governed, it has clearly prohibited leading cadres from doing business in the name of relatives, and also required leading cadres to manage their relatives and staff around.
Yang Zhiyun also mentioned that in reality, some leading cadres do everything possible to circumvent the existing system. For example, officials from different regions exchange interests. The family members of leaders in region A go to region B to do business, and the family members of leaders in region B go to region A for business, and the two sides transfer benefits to each other. Therefore, it is necessary to further fill the loopholes in this regard.
Liu Jincheng, executive director of the Integrity Research Center of China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), told China News Weekly that in the cases of officials investigated and dealt with in the past, many leading cadres’ spouses and children have engaged in business activities. In addition to filling the loopholes in the system, punishment and supervision methods must also keep up, such as the use of big data to fight corruption.