China’s Anti-Graft Show Is Educational, With Unintended Lessons

One by one, the officials spoke candidly on camera about how they abused their power and accumulated enormous wealth. They looked relaxed, confident and even happy as they described bribes, kickbacks and other perks of corruption.

Getting seafood boxes stuffed with $300,000. Owning a fancy house for nearly every season. Running red lights without getting tickets.

It felt like watching Mafia dons recounting their most glorious criminal acts in a reality show. Except these were former officials of the Chinese Communist Party playing themselves in an anti-corruption documentary series.

The documentary work, produced by the state, was meant to celebrate the success of China’s top leader Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption campaign. But the series seemed to prove the opposite: The party hasn’t figured out a way to stamp out corruption.

Since Mr. Xi became the leader of the party in November 2012, nearly 4.4 million people have been investigated in corruption-related cases, according to the series, “Zero Tolerance.” Some 4 million party members have been disciplined.

“Zero Tolerance” is the eighth in a series of shows about fighting corruption that the party has produced since 2014 — and the best journalistically and artistically.

But the show’s producers, the state broadcaster and the party’s anti-graft enforcer, seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were airing the dirtiest laundry of the Communist Party, which, as the ruling party of a one-party state, has no one to blame for the rampant corruption but itself.

At times the documentary felt like a political satire show that offered absurdly detailed yet credible insights into how the corrupted acts were conducted and what drives its senior officials. And yes, the motivations were the usual ones: power, money and sex.

Here is what I learned from watching it.

1) It’s awesome to be a Chinese official

Officials can enjoy many perks, big and small, get all their whims pampered and live a privileged lifestyle that even money can’t buy.

A former vice minister of public security, Sun Lijun, who oversaw the nation’s police force, recounted how he used to receive four or five boxes of “seafood” each year from a provincial police official. In each box, there would be $300,000 in U.S. currency, totaling $15 million over the years.

“Every time he said he would deliver some seafood, I would know what it was about,” he said, smiling throughout his interview.

Wang Fuyu, formerly a deputy party secretary in Hainan Province and later in Guizhou Province, asked businesspeople to buy him houses in three cities for different seasons: winter on tropical Hainan Island, summer in the cool Guizhou Plateau and spring and fall in the southern city of Shenzhen. An avid golfer, he had a mansion on a golf course and could start swinging as soon as he stepped out of his door.

Chen Gang, Beijing’s longtime deputy mayor who studied at China’s top architecture school, used some of his $20 million in ill-gotten gains to fund a garden complex in the city’s suburbs that he designed. The complex, the documentary said, occupied 18 acres of land and included a Chinese courtyard, a Western-style all-glass mansion, a Japanese garden, an artificial white-sand beach, a theater and a spa.

The Chinese public was both fascinated and appalled by the unusually candid exposé.

Some social media users joked that the series felt like a recruiting commercial for civil servants, or a how-to guide to bribery. Others wondered why the documentary’s subjects spoke with so little remorse, even sounding boastful at times.

Some commentators suggested that perhaps the party should introduce real checks and balances, since the campaign seemed ineffective. Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Chen, as well as many other officials among the 16 cases featured in the series, took the majority of their bribes after Mr. Xi took power in late 2012, the documentary said.

The heavy censoring on social media suggests that the public’s reactions weren’t what the producers expected. On the social media Weibo platform, a post by the Central Television Station, the state broadcaster, had 1,500 comments — but fewer than 20 were visible.

“I don’t understand why little potatoes like us should watch ‘Zero Tolerance,’” wrote a Weibo user called @weichengzhaoyu01. “Is it to remind us how poor and pathetic our lives are?”

2) It’s all in the family

The officials weren’t usually directly involved. . A lot of times their wives, children and siblings acted on their behalf by taking the bribes or channeling them through shell companies.

Sons of two senior officials in Inner Mongolia set up a coal company that had no staff, capital or real business activities. Their only “work” was to sign contracts that let them buy coal at low prices and sell it at high ones.

Both sons admitted in interviews that they wouldn’t have had the opportunities if not for having powerful fathers.

When Zhang Qi, the former party secretary of Haikou, the capital city of Hainan Province, attended his son’s college graduation ceremony in Canada, a businessman who accompanied him on the trip gave the son about $80,000 as “living stipends.”

His son later “borrowed” millions of dollars from businesspeople to buy luxury cars and invest in businesses. The family, overall, collected $17 million in bribes, according to the documentary.

3) Power is money

The Chinese government has a lot of say in the economy because it owns almost all the land, natural resources and banks. Officials, in turn, have enormous power to pick winners and losers at their whim, leaving a lot of room for corruption.

“The biggest seduction was that I had the final say,” Bai Xiangqun, former vice chairman of Inner Mongolia, said in his interview. “I could approve this or that for the business bosses.”

It’s been well understood since ancient times in China that with power comes many things, especially money.

Wang Like, the police official who used to deliver “seafood money,” was born to a wealthy family. But his father decided that business was a harder way to make money than working as a government official, his brother said in the documentary. So Mr. Wang joined the government.

Chen Gang, the former deputy mayor of Beijing, said he used his discretionary power in city planning to seek bribes. After a developer got a piece of land, it was up to Mr. Chen what the developer could build and how much of the land could be developed. “All of these would affect his bottom line,” he said.

Some of the officials saw nothing wrong with the power-for-money arrangement.

“I always felt that they owed me,” Liu Guoqiang, former vice governor of northeastern Liaoning Province, said of the businesspeople who bribed him. “I helped them growing from small to big. They gave me money because they were genuinely grateful.” He accepted bribes worth $55 million.

4) They were remorseful, sort of

The officials said that they regretted what they had done. Many social media users were doubtful, saying that they sounded more like people who had gambled on getting away with it, but had the bad luck to be caught.

Considering their ability to live double lives as the party’s senior leaders, it makes sense to be skeptical of their regrets.

The documentary called Mr. Wang, the avid golfer, a “double-faced person.” The walls of his golf mansion, the footage showed, are decorated with Chinese calligraphy, including texts that boasted how much he cared about the public and how little he cared about money and fame.

“It was correct to arrest me,” Mr. Wang says loudly at one point. “I failed to stay true to the original aspiration and the founding mission,” he said, repeating political jargon popular under Mr. Xi that meant to put the public’s interests first.

The series was aired after the prime-time evening news for five days in mid-January. As soon as its first episode ran, related hashtags were viewed about 180 million times, the official newspaper of the anti-graft enforcer reported in a glowing review. The viewership doubled compared with a different show that was in the same time slot a week earlier.

The Chinese government is getting better at making propaganda. The question is whether the approach that created blockbuster propaganda films should be applied to anti-corruption documentaries.

“Technically it’s successful,” said Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of China’s Crony Capitalism. “But political effect is another matter.”