Official rules out appeal against corruption sentence
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Former official Zhou Jiugeng, whose luxury lifestyle was revealed on the Internet in photos showing him smoking super expensive cigarettes, has decided against appealing an 11-year prison sentence on corruption charges, a court official said Wednesday.
An official at the Intermediate People's Court of Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, on Wednesday told Xinhua of Zhou's decision, four days after he received a jail term and an order for the confiscation of 1.2 million yuan (175,784 U.S. dollars) of his personal property.
The official said Zhou's lawyer had officially notified the court that no appeal would be lodged.
Zhou, former director of the real estate management bureau of Jiangning District of Nanjing, was convicted of accepting bribes amounting to more than 1.1 million yuan from real estate companies and lower-level officials.
Zhou, 49, had been under fire since he told the media on Dec. 10 that real estate developers should be punished for selling apartments below cost, to the outrage of many Chinese burdened with heavy mortgages.
Some, who wondered why Zhou made the remarks, noticed a luxurious lifestyle from photos.
In photos published widely online, Zhou wore a Vacheron Constantin watch, which costs at least 100,000 yuan in China and smoked cigarettes costing about 150 yuan per pack. Zhou was also found to be driving a Cadillac to work.
These luxuries were too expensive for someone on his salary.
"Zhou's case is a great shock among local officials, as it is hard to believe expensive cigarettes have become the fuse of the case," said an official with the Nanjing municipal government, who declined to be named.
Such downfalls are becoming more frequent as the authorities have punished, or even jailed, officials who were first accused on the Internet.
The most recent example was two officials in Xinjiang, husband and wife, who were dismissed from their posts in the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps earlier this week for bullying employees at a tourist site, as alleged by many Internet postings.
The couple were caught using a public vehicle for a personal trip to the Mogao Grottoes in Gansu Province during the National Day holidays.
Du Chongyan, head of Xiangxi prefecture in Hunan Province, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for accepting bribes from lower-level officials and others at the end of last month.
An investigation against him started within days of an Internet posting claiming he had an affair with a girl, a native of Xiangxi who attended the same university as his son.
"The disciplinary authorities have noticed that the Internet is a good tool in the fight against corruption, as everyone is free to report," said Xie Shicheng, a political science professor in Nanjing Normal University.
"I think the Internet is a platform that the Party and the masses work together in fighting corruption," Xie said.
In another sign of the role of Internet, "wangluo fanfu," or "anti-corruption on the Internet," is listed as an entry in a dictionary on "Party building" published by the publishing house of the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee.
The CPC would "promote creativity" in fighting corruption, said the CPC Central Committee last month in a communique of a key plenum.
The communique said the fight against corruption was a "major political task" the Party must always implement well.
It vowed to resolutely fight corruption and "fully explore the arduous and complicated nature of the combat against corruption."
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