“Kangming-Hotel” is written in red letters on a huge stone at the gate: There is a driveway for limousines, the luggage trolleys are waiting in the foyer, but you are not allowed to enter the facility immediately behind the Forbidden City. “This is no longer an ordinary hotel,” hissed the guard at the gate. “Unfortunately you have to go again.” A few years ago, a Central Committee unit took over here. You can only stay overnight at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party.
A welcome guest was Zhang Gaoli. The 75-year-old was China’s Deputy Prime Minister from 2013 to the beginning of 2018 and sat on the Standing Committee of the Politburo until autumn 2017. The body of seven elderly gentlemen is the power center of the People’s Republic.
At the Kangming Hotel, Zhang booked the tennis hall, which is located on the upper floor of the building. After his retirement, he contacted the tennis player Peng Shuai, and he and his wife Kang Jie invited them to the Kangming Hotel. The gates opened for Peng. After the match, they drove to Zhang’s house. What happened after that, Peng described in a text that she uploaded to the Chinese short message service Weibo on November 2nd as follows: “Then you brought me to your room. Like ten years ago in Tianjin, you wanted to have sex with me.” Somebody stood guard in front of the door. “I didn’t agree that afternoon and cried the whole time. I had dinner with you and Aunt Kang Jie.”
The text survived less than 30 minutes on the Internet, the censorship extinguished thoroughly. Anyone who has searched for their name since then receives an error message, even terms such as “tennis” cannot currently be entered. Apparently no one in China should find out that one of the country’s most influential men is involved in a “Me Too” case.
So who is this Zhang Gaoli whom the apparatus is trying with all its might to protect? He was born in 1946 in the coastal province of Fujian into a farming family. He was the youngest of five children. After studying economics, he started working as a warehouse worker for an oil company in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in 1970. After the end of the Cultural Revolution and the economic opening up, Zhang rose in the bureaucracy: in the early 1980s he was appointed deputy party leader of Maoming. In 1997 he was appointed party secretary in Shenzhen, the largest city in Guangdong. 40 years ago, Shenzhen was still a collection of fishing villages on the border with Hong Kong; today it is a metropolis with more than ten million inhabitants.
Xi Jinping’s father was one of his sponsors
During his time in Guangdong, Zhang met with the governor at the time for advice. The man’s name was Xi Zhongxun, and he was Xi Jinping’s father. In 2001, Zhang himself became governor in east China’s Shandong Province. In 2007 he moved as party leader to Tianjin, a port metropolis about an hour’s drive east of Beijing. Tianjin is the hometown of Peng Shuai. In her Weibo post, Peng described how she was Zhang’s lover for years while he was in Tianjin. “Our affection had nothing to do with money or power,” Peng noted. When Zhang rose to the highest ranks in China in 2012, he abruptly ended the relationship.
Very few of the Communist Party experts and political interpreters had him on the slip at the time. Zhang performed rather inconspicuously in Tianjin. “Do more, speak less,” was his motto. At the time, the rise of Bo Xilai, who, as party leader of Chongqing, let Mao-Hymen crush his people, seemed more likely to be a promotion for the pale Zhang. However, when his wife Gu Kailai was convicted in spring 2012 of murdering a British businessman, Bo’s career came to an end. He has been in jail ever since.
Zhang witnessed Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption fight up close. Hundreds of thousands of cadres lost their jobs. Xi took action against the lower ranks – called “flies” by the propaganda – as well as against the big ones, who had put millions aside, the “tigers”, as Xi scolded them. How inconsistent this struggle was, however, was shown in the 2016 Panama Papers. Xi’s own brother-in-law, Deng Jiagui, had founded several offshore companies and made millions. But not only he: a man named Lee Shing Put can also be found in the data. He is a partner in three companies in the British Virgin Islands. Above all, however, he is the son-in-law of Zhang Gaoli, the powerful vice-premier. Information that was just as rigorously censored in China at the time as Peng Shuai’s name is today.