Letter from Chongqing: Corpses on the Yangtze and ghosts in the city

On the banks of the Yangtze river in Chongqing, between cranes and stockpiles of coal where barges filled with iron ore and gravel slip past, lies an outcrop where corpse gatherers go to spot cadavers floating down China's longest river.

This is a grimy spot in a city of superlatives. By some measures, Chongqing is the world's biggest city, with more than 30 million people, but in reality it is a bureaucratic construct, carved out of Sichuan province in 1997 and turned into a municipality under the stewardship of Beijing. With an area of 82,400sq km, it's as big as Austria, and you can drive for hours without leaving the municipality.

Much of it is riverscape not unlike where we are standing now, looking for a “fisherman of corpses”.

We spend the morning driving around Jiangbei port, and eventually we get directions from a woman working in a weighing station.

Everyone knows Chen Song, or is familiar with what he does. Chen finds about 100 corpses a year, we hear, but in one week last year he found 70 bodies. Word gets around the area that a foreigner is looking to talk to him, and a car starts to follow us.

The driver of the silver Honda which has tracked us says that Chen won’t do an interview, and we should go.

Perhaps he won't talk because he is attracting too much attention – the body fishermen of Chongqing have been in the news in China, and there are rumours that many of the bodies are migrant women murdered and disposed of in the river. The others are suicides.

Just over 170km downstream – still in Chongqing – is China’s most famous ghost complex, Fengdu, a grouping of shrines and temples related to ancient Chinese concepts of hell and the underworld, but the whole city is ghostly – often misty, with fog shrouding the green hills and a damp climate.

Cleaning up crime

One of the spectres that haunt Chongqing is that of

Bo Xilai

, the suave one-time rising star in the

Communist Party

, now jailed for corruption but once revered as the party secretary who built the subway, increased pensions and gave Chongqing a sense of identity, as well as cleaning up organised crime.

His star rose too high. Bo fell foul of the leadership and, in September 2013, was found guilty of corruption and jailed for life.

Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, had earlier been found guilty of poisoning the British businessman Neil Heywood at the Nanshan Lijing Holiday Hotel over a business deal in still-mysterious circumstances.

There are signs the ghosts of the Bo Xilai scandal are being put to rest as Chongqing reaps the benefits of Bo’s foresight, at the same time as the city is lifted by Beijing’s plans to look west to increase foreign trade.

You enter Chongqing – built on a series of hills – from the airport via a terrifying network of multilayer flyovers perched high above the ground. Vertiginous construction projects are common in the city – one pedestrian bridge dangles 40m in the air.

Last year, Chongqing’s gross domestic product rose by 10.7 per cent, much faster than the 25-year low of 6.9 per cent recorded nationally.

And investment in infrastructure rose 30 per cent last year to 73.05 billion yuan (€10 billion).

While Bo, Gu and other senior figures, including his security czar, Wang Lijun, have all gone to jail, the purge did not bring down Bo's economic adviser, Huang Qifan, who is now mayor and tipped to become China's top financial adviser, tasked with sorting out the chaotic financial market system.

Silk Road initiative

Chongqing is a key element in President Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road initiative, or the One Belt, One Road project as it is known, which focuses on trade with central Asia and Europe.

The government is building a free-trade port town in the Liangjiang area, while the 11,000km-long Eurasia international railway starts here, running through Central Asia before terminating in Duisburg, Germany.

Bo’s successor as Chongqing party boss, Sun Zhengcai, is tipped for top national leadership, and increasingly he is looking like the cadre to finally banish the ghost of Bo Xilai.

In January, Xi Jinping visited Chongqing and stood shoulder to shoulder with Sun as he inspected port and railway projects to support the One Belt, One Road project. It was one of those highly symbolic moves that give a rare insight into China’s political machinations.

“This place is very promising,” the president said.

This is the first of three articles from Chongqing. Tomorrow: Clifford Coonan speaks to workers who have been affected by the government’s economic reforms and massive social change.