By staff reporter Shen Hu

The machine tools are silent and shop floors are empty at a sprawling factory in Ningde, Fujian Province, that’s designed to produce 5,000 delivery vans, tankers trucks and other vehicles every year.

The plant is only a few years old, but it’s already a dilapidated shell beside a shabby office building and worker dormitories on a large tract of undeveloped land, covered in luxuriant green grass.

It’s also at the center of a corruption scandal involving local government officials that’s nearly ruined the factory run by Fujian Special Vehicles Co. Ltd., a company jointly held by state-owned China National Heavy Duty Truck Group Corp. (CNHTC) and Xin Hong Da Group.

Investigators have spent four years on the case, and the latest target is Chen Shaoyong, a member of the provincial Communist Party Standing Committee and a former party secretary for Ningde with a long history of shady business ties.

Charges Mount

Caijing learned that Chen was spirited away in mid-July by officials with the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Also taken into custody was his wife, Huang Yaoqian, who formerly served as Ningde customs commissioner and personnel director for the customs office in the provincial capital Fuzhou.

They were being held under China’s double regulation legal system, shuanggui, which makes wayward party officials subject to discipline from the party as well as police.

One source said Chen and Huang have been charged with smuggling. Officials also apparently targeted Chen for his ties to Jin Fusheng.

Jin preceded Chen as local party secretary, and also served as a former provincial standing committee member and propaganda department minister. He was nabbed in 2005 and sentenced to life in prison last year after being convicted for pocketing bribes worth 7.66 million yuan.

Another source said Chen’s detention is tied to the unresolved case of Feng Dehui, a former Ningde underworld leader and chairman of Honggui Real Estate Development Co. Ltd. Numerous government officials in Ningde were implicated along with Feng, who has been detained since around August 2004.

Feng’s case involves bribery and organized crime charges linked to land and real estate projects. But the current status of his case is unknown; officials have declined comment.

A third notable figure tied to the Chen detention is Xin Hong Da’s chairwoman, Zheng Shaoqing. She’s been an investigation target as well.

Rocky Reputation, Smooth Career

Until now, Chen had apparently dodged the party’s battle against graft in Ningde. He replaced the disgraced Jin as city party secretary in May 2002. Three years later, at age 50, he was promoted to the provincial party standing committee.

Throughout his career, which began after he graduated from Fujian Normal University with a history degree, Chen was repeatedly promoted despite lackluster job performance and a rotten reputation – a fact that puzzles retired Fujian cadres interviewed by Caijing.

Locals described Chen as lecherous. Many called him “piggy brother” which, in the Fujian dialect, means “lascivious.”

In local political circles, Chen is well known for getting caught by guards at a Fuzhou park in a compromising position with a female cadre from the Fuqing Municipal Group Committee. At the time, he was a member of the Youth League Provincial Party Committee.

After serving with the Group Provincial Party Committee seven years, Chen was named party deputy secretary in the city of Putian, a post he held for 10 years.

An insider recalls that after Chen became chairman of Putian’s branch of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, many thought his political career was finished. Unexpectedly, Chen bounced back as Putian party deputy secretary and mayor.

Later, Chen took over a financial mess in Ningde created during Jin’s six years in power. One insider said the city got embroiled in up to 1 billion yuan in illegal financing during Jin’s tenure.

After Chen took office, a series of funding scandals surfaced. Meanwhile, the two cities and six counties under Ningde’s juridiction had become a haven for gambling. Almost every county built casinos, and some were financed by county leaders themselves.

Official posts were for sale. One local official remembers facing the fact that “if you don’t deliver, you won’t rise.”

In 2003, Ningde officialdom suffered an earthquake as more than 10 officials were stripped of their posts. These included several promoted by Jin and investigated for their ties to his case.

Mountainous, economically underdeveloped Ningde has been called “Fujian’s cadre testing field” for potential party leaders. The province picks cadres and often sends them for short stints in Ningde simply for experience, said a city government official.

Land Connection

Chen’s case apparently stemmed from illegal land grants in Ningde given to Zheng. Insiders said the two have had close relations.

Zheng is a Fujian native and social butterfly whose Hong Kong husband established the Jieren Group, Fujian’s first wholly owned foreign company, in the 1980s. After the husband died in 1993, she took over the family businesses, which have grown to 16 enterprises with assets of more than 900 million yuan.

In 2003, Zheng established Xin Hong Da, which has interests in industry, agriculture, tourism, real estate and foreign trade. But the firm’s investment records are fuzzy, and some data can’t be traced.

Xin Hong Da’s single largest investment was the Fujian Special Vehicle Group, which was formed in 2003 after Zheng struck a deal with CNHTC, based in Shandong Province.

According to local media reports, then-Ningde party secretary Chen went to inspect CNHTC’s facilities in 2003. Soon, Ningde government support helped streamline the agreement signed by Xin Hong Da and CNHTC for opening the plant by the end of 2004.

Now the factory is barely alive. Building the plant cost about 100 million yuan, but its business has been limited to modifying a few hundred vehicles built elsewhere, Caijing learned.

Company personnel told Caijing that, over the two years of actual factory production, each of the more than 300 modified vehicles sold has fetched a price ranging from 40,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan.

While production revenue has been thin, however, the company apparently can boast control of valuable land.

A local real estate source estimated the land’s value may have doubled since the factory project began. A former senior official at Xin Hong Da said Chen helped the company obtain the land, although the actual price paid has not been made public, and the lush grass growing around the quiet factory isn’t telling.

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