FEAR is Wang Qishan’s favoured weapon. As leader of the Communist Party’s most sustained and wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign in its history, he often urges his investigators to be “frightening”. One story goes that at a meeting of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), convened after Mr Wang took charge of it in November 2012, senior members—themselves among the most feared officials in the party—were presented with dossiers of their own sins. Mr Wang’s aim, it appeared, was to terrorise the enforcers themselves. Failure to uncover high-level graft, he has warned them, would be “dereliction of duty”.
At the time, a few were said to have grumbled—relentlessly pursuing the powerful over ill-gotten gains had not been a common feature of the unruffled life of a CCDI official. Before taking up the job, corruption had not even been Mr Wang’s preoccupation. A one-time banker and mayor of Beijing, he had gained a reputation as a troubleshooter during crises such as a deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003 and the global financial crisis of 2008-09. To foreign dignitaries he even came...Continue reading
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