Corruption Probes: Life ... At Club Fed; Beset by cadres on the take, party leaders are building plush accomodations for top suspects.

Byline: Melinda Liu (With Duncan Hewitt in Shanghai)

In the countryside outside Beijing, what looks like a luxury guesthouse is rising amid fruit orchards, replete with a fitness center and individual villas. Of course, the construction site also features high walls and security guards--lots of guards. NEWSWEEK has learned that the compound, near the district of Pinggu, is actually going to be a five-star detention facility capable of housing dozens of senior cadres under kid-glove "hotel arrest" while they undergo investigation for wrongdoing. Call it China's equivalent of "Club Fed."

With one key difference. Shanghai's disgraced party secretary Chen Liangyu, who was purged from the Politburo last week, and the hundreds of other cadres caught up in anti-corruption probes across the country have not been officially charged with crimes in the Western sense. Instead, they're being confined and interrogated by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Discipline and Inspection Commission. In a press conference last week, commission head Gan Yisheng responded to questions about Chen by vowing that "any party member who violates party discipline, no matter how high or low in rank, will be thoroughly investigated and seriously dealt with." Gan revealed that 11,701 party members were expelled from the 70-million-strong CCP last year for corruption and graft.

After a quarter century of trailblazing market reforms, virtually every faction--from the elitist "Shanghai gang" of ex-president Jiang Zemin to the "populist" faction ...