China's Jia survives test to win second term

BEIJING (Reuters) - Dogged by corruption charges, China's fourth most powerful Communist Party leader, Jia Qinglin, has been seen as proof that in the Communist Party's murky politics, connections trump clean hands.

The 67-year-old has never quite lived down a massive smuggling scandal that happened under his watch when he was in charge of the southeastern province of Fujian in the 1990s, despite his name being officially cleared.

Jia managed not only to hang on, but to eventually win promotion to the Standing Committee, the Party's highest ranks, due to his close allegiance to former leader Jiang Zemin.

And on Monday he was re-elected, surviving an internal Party vote to hang on to his position.

Jia headed Fujian when the Yuanhua Group bribed officials to turn a blind eye to smuggling through the port city of Xiamen, a scandal that implicated more than 200 senior figures, including his wife, Lin Youfang.

Several were executed in connection with the case, which embroiled kingpin Lai Changxing, who is fighting extradition charges to China from Canada.

His allegiance to Jiang saved Jia, an engineer from the northern province of Hebei. Their relationship is said to date back decades, when the two technocrats worked together at the Ministry of Machine-Building Industry.

"Plainly, he's Jiang's man," said Lai Hongyi, a lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Following the Fujian debacle, Jiang took pains to show his support for Jia by appearing alongside him in the state media.

Jia was whisked north to become mayor of Beijing, itself reeling from a massive corruption case that saw its party chief, Chen Xitong, arrested and vice mayor Wang Baosen commit suicide.

Beijing during Jia's tenure focused resources on the city's Zhongguancun district, which was developed into a high-tech hub that has become known as China's Silicon Valley.

In 2002, he defied expectations that his tainted past would curtail his rise to power, becoming the number four in the Party leadership line-up under President Hu Jintao and head of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a largely toothless body that advises China's rubber-stamp parliament.

But his staying power is seen as undermining the leadership's efforts to stamp out corruption, a campaign that has seen Hu sack officials as close to the heart of power as former Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu and Beijing vice-mayor Liu Zhihua.