Beijing Liaison Offices, Xi Jinping's Backdoor to Corruption

Zhujingban (駐京辦), or Beijing Liaison Offices, the corrupt representative offices of provincial or municipal governments based in China's capital, are rekindled from cold ashes in the Xi Jinping era.

Once called “a cancerous outgrowth of the ‘government-business nexus’” (“亦官亦商” 的毒瘤),¹ Zhujingban (駐京辦), or Beijing Liaison Offices (BLOs), the representative offices of provincial or municipal governments based in China’s capital, gained notoriety for corruption in the 2000s thanks to a Chinese novel that exposed the dark underbelly of officialdom.

While the Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) Administration (2002-2012) made some efforts to clamp down on the BLOs, the Xi Jinping (習近平) Administration (2012- ), known for its prolonged anti-corruption campaign, has nearly overlooked their existence.

According to an article in Outlook Weekly (瞭望周刊) published in January 2010, thousands of BLOs were to be abolished within the next six months.² In November of the same year, the National Government Offices Administration (NGOA, 國家機關事務管理局), an agency directly under the State Council (國務院), announced that it had only ceased the operations of 625 BLOs, despite reports showing that the total number exceeded 10,000.³

Why the Hu Jintao Administration stalled on fully shutting down BLOs, even though they were subject to scathing criticism from its own media outlets, remained a mystery.

The BLOs, largely underrated by Western scholars, provided a fantastic prism through which to zoom in on China’s political culture, offering a unique perspective on its inner workings.

Officialdom Novels and Corrupt BLOs

China’s “officialdom novels” (官場小説), a time-honored genre of political fiction, continue to hold relevance today, serving as a powerful lens through which to examine and critique political corruption.

The officialdom novels have their roots in the “condemnation novels” (譴責小説) of the late Qing Dynasty. The condemnation novels, such as Officialdom Unmasked (官場現形記, 1901-1906), Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two Decades (二十年目睹之怪現狀, 1903-1910), The Travels of Lao Can (老殘游記, 1907), and A Flower in a Sinful Sea (孽海花, 1904-1941), were knowned for their condemnation and critique of the officialdom, whereas the officialdom novels greatly weakened the critical condemnation of the officialdom. Distinct from their forerunners in the late Qing China, the officialdom novels are often filled with admiration for power and idealized bureaucrats, while paradoxically endorsing the very political system that breeds corruption. At the same time, this new genre positions its “objectivity” and “realism” in the service of pragmatic purposes, such as serving as a guidebook for political survival in the bureaucracy or as an anti-corruption manual.⁴

The Director of Beijing Liaison Office (駐京辦主任, 2007), the novel that brought to light the appalling corruption of BLOs, was one of the most successful officialdom novels of the time. The second half of the 2000s witnessed a surge in officialdom novels, paralleling heightening public dissatisfaction with rampant political corruption. The first quarter of 2009 alone, for instance, saw 123 officialdom novels published, compared to only 118 for the entire year of 2008.⁵

Yet the heyday of officialdom novels is over, and their popularity is waning. The decline of officialdom novels can be attributed to their hypocrisy, lack of literariness, and exploitation of anti-corruption rhetoric to romanticize and revel in political corruption, according to a 2022 article in Xinmin Weekly (新民周刊).⁶

The BLOs came under the spotlight after the publication of The Director of Beijing Liaison Office in 2007. Its author, Wang Xiaofang (王曉方), served as a secretary to a deputy mayor of Shenyang City. After the deputy mayor was arrested for corruption, Wang Xiaofang exposed the political corruption he had witnessed to the public. Before that, the Chinese public remained largely unaware of the extent to which the BLOs are distorted, although the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中紀委) and the Ministry of Supervision (監察部) already listed the rectification of BLOs as one of the four major tasks for 2006.⁷

Nevertheless, it took nearly five years for the Hu Jintao Administration only to disband 625 BLOs, equivalent to just 6% of the total number. This highlighted the immense difficulty of plugging the holes in government corruption by closing down BLOs, even though officialdom novels such as The Director of Beijing Liaison Office had possibly been exploited as political propaganda to support the campaign. The reality was: the Hu Jintao Administration was too weak to centralize power and implement meaningful reforms, given that Hu Jintao’s authority was considerably curtailed by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin (江澤民).⁸

Simply put, these BLOs are like embassies sent to Beijing by local governments, universities, institutes, and enterprises. Eccentric as they might appear, the BLOs are by no means dispensable.

Here’s why: