The former Beijing party chief, Mr Chen Xitong, has been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and handed over to prosecutors to face criminal charges for corruption. The decision is being interpreted in the Chinese capital as a bold move which could help consolidate the moral leadership of the Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin, at a critical point in the history of the party. Mr Chen (67) was a member of the ruling Politburo until his sacking in April 1995, after Beijing's deputy mayor, Wang Baosen, committed suicide while under investigation in a $37 million corruption scandal. President Jiang has been waging a campaign against high-level corruption, and the ruling on Mr Chen, taken after months of internal debate, is clearly a victory for his allies who believe that open toleration of influence-peddling and bribe-taking at the top could mean the end of the Communist Party.
The move is also likely to prove popular with a public weary of official corruption, and the timing will help shape the public mood as the party begins its crucial five-yearly Congress in Beijing on Friday.
Mr Chen, the first member of the 19-strong ruling Politburo to face criminal charges, was a protege of Deng Xiaoping, a factor which may have made the leadership hesitate to take action before the leader's death in February.
Party members gathering in Beijing for the Congress will also be aware that Mr Chen took a hard line against pro-democracy student demonstrators at the time of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, and that his disgrace may signal a fresh look at the bloody events which have left an unhealed scar in China's politics.
Communist leaders have been playing down expectations of political reform at the Congress, where Deng's open-door economic policies will be re-endorsed, but isolated voices calling for change, stilled for eight years, are being raised again in the party. In an open letter to the party, the imprisoned dissident, Bao Ge, urged leaders to adopt freedom of the press and multi-party democracy at the week-long Congress, and to reverse the verdict on the Tiananmen Square protests, which party leaders categorised as counter-revolutionary rebellion.
The decision to expel Mr Chen was taken by the party's Discipline Inspection Commission on August 29th, according to a communique issued from a pre-Congress plenum yesterday. "Chen, taking advantage of his position, had accepted and embezzled a large number of valuable items and had squandered a large amount of public funds to support a corrupt and decadent life," it said. He had also abused his powers to help relatives and aides run businesses and had been responsible to a serious extent for the criminal activities of disgraced vice-mayor Wang.
An earlier internal report said Mr Chen kept a mistress for six years and gave her family nine apartments around Beijing. He also enriched himself from public funds to the tune of 200 million yuan ($24 million). One of Mr Chen's sons, Chen Xiaotong, was sentenced in June to 12 years in prison for corruption, taking bribes and misusing public funds. He was former president of a Sino-Japanese joint venture hotel in Beijing, the New Century. He was also accused of channelling funds to his father's girlfriend and urging her to flee to Hong Kong after Wang's suicide.
Earlier this year, Wrath of Heaven, a novel written under a pseudonym, purported to give the seamier details of the scandal, which involved a collapsed pyramid investment scheme. It described a city's party chief, his son and the vice-mayor sharing a television presenter as a mistress, and said the vice-mayor killed himself after being blackmailed by the son with a secretly-taken videotape of a tryst within a hotel bedroom. The book was subsequently banned. Editorial comment: page 15