Crown Prince Party

“My father is Li Gang” was one of the most popular phrases in China over the past year. In March 2010, Li Qiming, 22, the son of the deputy police chief in the Beishi district of Baoding named Li Gang from Hubei Province, fatally struck a female college student while driving a luxury sedan while drunk. When caught by police for the hit-and-run accident, he said, “My father is Li Gang.” The Chinese people grew angry as word spread on the Internet of numerous similar cases in the past. The son was sent to prison and his father was fired.

Today, Chinese aristocrats are members of the "Crown Prince Party." Like Li Qiming, they have both money and power thanks to their fathers, who are high-ranking government officials. Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party secretary of Chongqing whose father was a revolutionary comrade of Mao Zedong, was also from the Crown Prince Party. Bo’s son Guagua, a 24-year-old Harvard University student, is known to have had lavish parties with girls. Middle-aged “crown princes” have tried to prove their ability through fierce competition and avoided incurring public resentment though they benefited from their fathers’ background. Fortunately, they hid their corruption thanks to their advantage of media control.

Their children, or the young crown princes, are different. Like an old saying goes, “A pampered child is spoiled.” On the back of their fathers and grandfathers, they waste money and wield power recklessly. They hardly know how difficult it is to control the media in the Internet era. Bo can hardly make a political comeback after pictures showed his son driving a red Ferrari and partying with half-naked white girls. China`s state-run People’s Daily ran a series of editorials stressing discipline by senior party officials. Though the Communist Party has tries to downplay the scandal as the actions of an individual, not the party, the case involving Bo and his son is a structural problem combining the Crown Prince Party, corruption and the Chinese economy.

The Chinese economy has become a solution amid the global financial crisis, so the Chinese socialist economy, in which a competent state controls the market, has become the new ideal. Most of the country`s state-run companies control the Chinese economy, but are tied to the Crown Prince Party directly and indirectly like a lifeline of corruption. Capitalism originating from the U.S. and Europe is corrupt but not as bad as China’s crony capitalism, a combination of power and capital. The “Crown Prince economy” in which democracy cannot coexist might not be a good model of market economy for Korea.

Editorial Writer Kim Sun-deok (yuri@donga.com)