A CHANGING OF THE KLEPTOCRATS:

Show them the money, old China: Despite clampdowns and the mayor's war on gangsters and corruption, Chongqing's king of finance Weng Zhenjie and his cronies keep coming up trumps. (John Garnaut, March 26, 2011, Sydney Morning Herald)

Zhang's dossier of Weng Zhenjie's gangland antics - one multimillionaire congress delegate dumping on another - would be remarkable anywhere. But in Chongqing it landed like a bombshell.

''This is the most brutal battle in Chongqing's business community since liberation,'' says a manager at one of Chongqing's largest and well-connected private companies, who knows both protagonists well.

This, after all, is the thriving Yangtze River metropolis where China's only maverick leader, Communist Party boss Bo Xilai, has gained nationwide acclaim by reclaiming the streets from the city's mafia. Bo has thrown thousands of lesser ''black society'' gangsters and their Communist Party protectors in jail and executed several, including the vice-president of the Supreme Court.

As well as ''striking black'', Bo Xilai has been "singing red" by leading his city in rousing cultural revolution songs. He has launched an ambitious ''red GDP'' campaign to strengthen state ownership, build public housing and accelerate China's (already breakneck) urbanisation by coaxing and pushing peasants off their land.

And yet, throughout it all, Weng Zhenjie has managed to grow bigger.

The ascendencies of big brother Weng and comrade Bo reveal the alchemy of power in China today and a signal as to where the country may be heading. Both men have spun astonishingly complex webs of loyalty and patronage through the Communist Party and its red-blood aristocracy. They have exploited every lever at their disposal and chosen their targets carefully.

Weng's wealth and reputation grew out of China's military-industrial complex. In the 1990s he left the Peoples Liberation Army to join the Carrier (Kaili) Group, one of two main arms-trading companies of the time. The Carrier Group was controlled by a special kind of "princeling", Ye Xuanning, whom others in that club of communist aristocrats refer to as their ''spiritual leader''.

Ye also ran another lucrative enterprise, the liaison office of the General Political Department of the PLA, which was once responsible for exporting revolution across south-east Asia and which still lubricates links throughout Asia's Chinese diaspora. Ye inherited his status from his father, Marshal Ye Jianying.

There's no sign that Weng deals directly with the Ye family but he does sit on the boards of several major companies with the family's key financial officer, Li Junyang. Li, in turn, has myriad connections, including through his gambling habits in Macau and the environmental organisation he runs with a brother of the anointed future president, Xi Jinping.

With this calibre of perceived backing, Weng leveraged himself into the cockpit of Chongqing's financial system. He confronted and then reached accommodation with the current Chongqing mayor, with his spoils including opaque shareholdings and effective control over the city's most important state-owned securities and finance companies.

Weng began dressing more regularly in Western suits, he obtained a seat on the Chongqing People's Congress and he launched a money-laundering service for the ''grey income'' of dozens of senior officials, according to several local businessmen who know him well. He bought himself more good luck by donating 100 million yuan in ''compensation'' to police who might have been injured in Bo Xilai's mafia crackdown.

Even before Bo Xilai began his anti-mafia campaign he stood out as the only publicly charismatic cadre in the Politburo.

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