SPECIAL REPORT
as possible.
“Isn’t it easy for officials to take bribes? Taking in three million or
five million [US$435,000 to $725,000] every year for them is as easy
as child’s play. A county mayor can tantalise entrepreneurs with in-
vestment opportunities, and a county Party secretary can do some
money-for-official-position deals. Such occurrences used to be ex-
tremely common until 2014,” Zhou said.
To further delve into the real status of fallen officials, Zhou inter-
viewed inmates in Pukou Prison in Nanjing in 2015, accompanied
by SPP staff.
Zhou attempted to explore the inner conflicts of the officials after
their fall from high position. What impressed him most was that,
besides being regretful, many convicts express a sense of feeling being
wronged.
“One of the officials has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for
embezzling 500,000 yuan [US$72,000]. ‘15 years!’ He repeated it sev-
eral times. I can feel his grievance strongly,” Zhou recalled. “500,000
yuan is a small sum compared to other cases of serious corruption.”
In the process of writing, Zhou paid close attention to corruption-
related news reports and studied the anti-graft cases that had come to
light since the 18th National Congress in 2012. Many of the cases
featured in In the Name of the People were based on real events, includ-
ing the famous case of Wei Pengyuan, former deputy head of the coal
department at the National Energy Administration.
To pose as an honest official, Wei usually rode a shabby old bi-
cycle to the office. Nevertheless, investigators found a bed made of
banknotes worth 230 million yuan, or more than $33 million, at
his villa. The sheer quantity of cash meant that four of 16 money-
counting machines burnt out during the investigation.
The case inspired Zhou to create a character in the first two epi-
sodes of In the Name of the People as an example of a seriously corrupt
low-level official.
From the writer’s perspective, corrupt officials are neither “demons”
nor “devouring tigers,” but “ordinary human beings of flesh and
blood.” “Sometimes a moment of weakness leads to a great mistake,”
Zhou said.
Zhou felt sad for these fallen mandarins: on the one hand, they
trampled the law and wreaked the political ecosystem; yet on the
other, the dysfunctional political ecosystem, where power roams un-
checked, had a corrupting effect on them.Scale
A remarkable element of In the Name of the People compared to
previous dramas in this genre is the seniority of corrupt officials. One
of the villains is a top-ranking government leader, something which
never happened in previous productions.
In the past, one guideline for anti-graft dramatic productions was
that the rank of antagonists should not be higher than the deputy
provincial and ministerial level.
To what extent would he be allowed to demonstrate the reality of
corruption? How far could his writing demonstrate the depths of
corruption? Such questions haunted Zhou Meisen throughout the
whole process of writing.
Zhou told ChinaReport that the character of the deputy state-level
official was not in the original plan. In his first draft, the highest rank
of corrupt official was the head of the public security department of
a province.
After reading the original script, Zhai Taifeng, former Party secre-A scene from In the Name of the People Not so hidden cash in In the Name of the People