05/21/2002

ONE OF THE crueller traditions in China's political system is the self-criticism session. The practice goes back at least to Ming Dynasty Community Compact meetings, when local residents would meet periodically to review individuals' behaviour, plan ceremonies and so on. The practice only reached a fever pitch during the many lunatic political campaigns of the Maoist era.

During the self-criticism sessions, party members were forced to flagellate themselves, often in public - and not because they had really done anything wrong. Instead, one person's public humiliation merely served to cement the position of his or her political rivals, who often presided over the spectacle.

The tradition has waned over the decades, especially compared with the days of the Cultural Revolution, when it was not unusual for a government minister to be forced to criticise himself in front of thousands of jeering Red Guards.

Today, a self-criticism is more likely to be written sheepishly behind closed doors after, say, a careless newspaper editor lets an untitled, unsigned and vaguely worded Falun Gong poem slip on to his usually closely guarded pages. With enough feigned humility, the "offender" is likely to get off with little more than a mild reprimand.

Earlier this month in Guangdong, however, the self-criticism made a very public comeback. And it did so in a humorous, rather than a harmful, fashion, when the eastern port city of Shantou (population 4.7 million) issued a collective mea culpa and even launched a Web site on which it placed the credibility of its companies under public scrutiny.

Shantou has a lot to apologise for. In the mid to late 1990s, local companies ran circles around the State Tax Administration.

They claimed billions of yuan in fraudulent value-added tax rebates from the central Government for "exports" they had never even manufactured, let alone shipped overseas. The scam required supporting documentation from local bank, customs and tax officials, who were happy to provide it as they saw the game as a way of enriching their backyard at faraway Beijing's expense.

The fraud in Shantou came to light only after two investigators from the Guangdong Disciplinary Inspection Commission were killed in a mysterious fire at a Shantou government guesthouse in July 2000. Hundreds of central Government investigators subsequently descended on Shantou. The city's party secretary was sacked and thousands of offending companies were shut down.

The scandal was a useful reminder of how frequently in China major cities act as if Beijing does not exist. Prior to the Shantou scandal, large smuggling rings were smashed in the western Guangdong port city of Zhanjiang and the Xiamen Special Economic Zone, where they had also acted for years in concert with local officials.

At about the same time, it emerged that the charismatic mayor of Shenyang, in Liaoning province, and much of his administration had been in the pockets of the local mob.

All were dismissed as isolated events. But when viewed from a broader perspective, a pattern emerges that makes it rather harder to accept the conventional wisdom that China is politically stable.

During Shantou's "rectification" campaign, which is now nearing the end of its second year, thousands of citizens were frequently mobilised to sign large banners pledging to build a cleaner and more honest city. Pictures of such mass campaigns have become a staple of Guangzhou's stodgiest papers and provide - albeit unintentionally - some light relief.

But not even the affected earnestness of thousands of Shantou residents roped into mandatory banner signings are as amusing as the more recent pictures of Guangdong Party Secretary Li Changchun surfing the Shantou Trustworthiness Network (http://shantou.credit.gov.cn) under the anxious gaze of the city's mayor and party secretary.

Although the Web site worried politicians like Mr Li, Chinese companies and foreign investors can review the history of Shantou-based enterprises. They can also review blacklists of, for example, Shantou companies whose operating licences have been suspended or companies that, though still operational, have prior records of "bad behaviour", including counterfeiting, loan defaults, tax evasion and smuggling.

Collating the data would not have been easy. The Web site's suspended-licences blacklist runs to 3,396 records spread across 340 pages.

On the other hand, only 215 operational companies are included on the Web site's bad behaviour list. On the plus side, about 26,800 local companies have been given clean bills of health.

"We had to be very careful when compiling the blacklists," Shantou Trustworthiness Office vice-director Liu Jinting said.

"Why? Because blacklisting a company is the same as announcing its death."