Corruption with feng shui

All the feng shui and all the lucky charms in the world couldn't save former railway minister Liu Zhijun from a death penalty with reprieve after being found guilty of taking bribes. It wasn't for a lack of trying though.

Liu had been photographed in the company of flamboyant, self-proclaimed feng shui and qigong guru Wang Lin, who is now on the run, believed to be in Hong Kong. Wang has told media that he and Liu were good friends, and that he had given Liu a lucky charm that would guarantee the safety of his position and bring him good luck.

Liu is far from the first Chinese official to seek supernatural aid. Some Chinese officials have been flocking toward superstition and religion in the belief that it will help their career, and in some cases are using public funds for this pursuit. This is despite the fact that the Communist Party of China (CPC) frowns upon superstition among its members.

A cavalcade of superstition

Yuan Jinzai (pseudonym), a self-proclaimed feng shui practitioner with a workshop in Shanghai, told the Global Times Tuesday that he used to receive "several" calls every month from clients who were officials, to discuss "measures" to change their fortunes.

Yuan said that normal suggestions included changing the location or decorations in the office, or adding some lucky items. "None of it is outrageous. We just try to correct some harmful energy by balancing the relationship between humans and the environment," Yuan said. He did not, however, discuss what the price or concrete results of these services are. When asked about the many outrageous cases involving corrupt officials, he went silent.

In one example of such a case, Hu Jianxue, the former Party secretary of Tai'an, Shandong Province, was told by a feng shui master that he would soon be appointed China's vice-premier but needed a "bridge" to fulfill this goal. Hu followed this advice and built a bridge by changing the route of a national highway to pass a reservoir. But he never became a vice-premier, partly because he was convicted of bribery and was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in 2012.

In another case, in a poor county in Gansu Province, officials spent 5 million yuan ($791,695) in 2010 to move a 300-ton rock to the county town square in a bid to block bad luck from entering the area and prevent good luck from escaping.

Ren Jianming, a professor of anti-graft studies from Tsinghua University, said that those traditional superstitions affected all of society and that officials are far from immune, but the key difference is that officials can have more impact on the public interest, and are in a position to abuse their power.

Faith in careers

Whilst China has had thousands of years of superstitious beliefs such as feng shui, the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 attempted to put a stop to these beliefs by replacing them with Marxist and atheist belief systems, albeit with Chinese characteristics.