Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
In May 2009, a wealthy 20-year-old was drag racing through the city streets of Hangzhou, China, when his Mitsubishi struck and killed a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The car was traveling so fast that the victim—a 25-year-old telecom engineer of a modest, rural background—was flung at least 20 yards. Afterward, bystanders and reporters photographed the driver, Hu Bin, as well as his rich friends, who nonchalantly smoked cigarettes and laughed while waiting for the police to arrive at the scene.
These images, soon posted online, provoked a public outcry. Anger
over the callous behavior of these wealthy Chinese youths was followed
by accusations of a police cover-up.
First, the local authorities admitted that they had underestimated the
speed Hu’s vehicle was traveling by half. (Incredibly, the police had
first suggested that Hu was going no more than 43 mph.) Public furor
rose again when Hu received a three-year prison sentence, an
exceptionally light punishment in a country where drunk drivers guilty
of similar accidents can receive the death penalty.
But the most stunning allegation was that the man appearing in court
and serving the three-year sentence wasn’t Hu at all, but a hired body
double.
The charge isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound. The practice of
hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official
Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president
who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to
“confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently
charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives
of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a
motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for
roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally
demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his
living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for
each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so
common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”
The ability to hire so-called substitute criminals is just one way in
which China’s extreme upper crust are able to live by their own set of
rules. While Occupy Wall Street grabbed attention for its attacks on the
“1 percent,” in China, a much smaller fraction of the country controls
an even greater amount of wealth. The top one-tenth of 1 percent in
China controls close to half of the country’s riches.
The children and relatives of China’s rulers, many of whom grew up
together, form a thicket of mutually beneficial relationships, with many
able to enrich themselves financially and, if necessary, gain protection from criminal allegations.
A police officer in central China agreed to discuss the phenomenon of
“replacement convicts” with me so long as I didn’t refer to him by
name. “America has the rule of law, but China has the rule of people,”
the police officer told me. “If somebody is powerful, there’s a good
chance they can make this happen. Spend some money and remain free.”
According to the police officer, hired stand-ins are “not common but not
rare either.” As examples, the officer listed several high-ranking
mafia figures whose underlings serve time in their stead. The mafia
cares for the substitute’s family and pays a bonus for the time served.
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