Writer praised for anti-graft drama

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Stories of how public officials get rich through corruption have kept one novelist writing furiously.

Novelist and scriptwriter Zhou Meisen, 61, has been keeping a close watch in the past few years on news of China's intensified anti-graft drive.

His newly published work In the Name of People and the 55-episode TV series present audiences with a picture of Chinese officialdom in the ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The drama, with an ensemble cast led by veteran actors Lu Yi and Zhang Fengyi, is built around a complex corruption case brought to light by conflicts at a factory in a fictional province.

Human touch on corrupt officials

Zhou Meishen has some familiarity with officialdom. He was a deputy secretary-general in the city government of Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, in the mid-1990s. He said friends still in that world have helped him write about it.

"As a writer, you should dare to delve into rarely touched sides (of anti-corruption campaigns). Otherwise, you lose the trust of your readers and audience," Zhou said. 

According to Zhou, there are various reasons for the corruption of an official, weakness of character, lures in an official career, traps set by other people, etc. "But actually, the ultimate reason is the unchecked development of human greed, with the power being not supervised effectively," he says.

"I've never considered corrupt officials as demons. They are human. I try to explore their inner conflicts after they fall from high positions," Zhou told Beijing News.

He gained initial fame with his 1983 novella The Sinking Land, and became one of the best-known Chinese writers on the political ecosystem.

But dramatic productions dealing with corruption dropped off the screen starting in 2004 with a change in government policies. 

A revival of the genre

The program shows signs of the lifting of the ban on programs that deal with corruption and violent crimes. Over the past 10 years, the broadcast of such programs was prohibited during prime time, but this one sailed through the approval process and was widely praised.

Now, the genre has been revived with the intensified determination of China's central leadership to crack down on corruption, starting with the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012.

In In the Name of the People, Zhou shows the political ecology of official circles. He notes that corrupt officials have their own speech codes. 

They speak differently in front of and behind the public. They use the term "for the people" repeatedly, and then actually harm people "in the name of people".

Fan Ziwen, deputy director of the Supreme People's Procuratorate's Film and Television Center, repeatedly visited Zhou, persuading him to pick up his pen again in the genre in early 2015.

Zhou visited a prison in Nanjing to interview inmates and also talked to police and procurators who dealt with corruption cases.

Li Lu, an award-winning director, worked on the series with Zhou, who wrote the script. Li convinced investors to agree to a budget of up to 120 million yuan ($17.4 million), double the typical cost of modern dramas.