Profile: Wang Qishan, China’s anti-corruption tsar

In the midst of the biggest bankruptcy in Chinese history in 1998, Wang Qishan, the Communist party official in charge of the process, received a visit from an old friend with a warning.

“I tried to tell him just how powerful these bankers were and how close their ties were to top political leaders and I said how worried I was about their reaction if he forced them to take such huge losses,” the friend and former colleague, Huang Jiangnan, told the Financial Times. “He just told me to stop speaking and insisted he had to persevere. He is really a very resolute and insistent person.”

A decade and a half later, the chain-smoking, straight-talking former historian will need all the resolve he can muster as he confronts far more implacable enemies in his role as China’s anti-corruption tsar.

Last week the body he leads – the party’s Central Commission for Discipline and Inspection – officially opened an investigation into Zhou Yongkang, the former head of China’s secret police and the most senior official to be publicly charged with corruption since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Mr Wang’s appointment as head of the CCDI in late 2012 was considered a disappointment by many who felt it would waste his impressive record tackling China’s most intractable financial, economic and foreign relations problems.

Officially at least, Mr Wang, now 66 years old, is ranked only sixth in the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee that in effect governs China and includes President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.

But more than 18 months into a vicious anti-corruption campaign that has netted nearly a quarter of a million cadres, including 39 officials of vice-minister rank or higher, Mr Wang’s power is now arguably second only to that of Mr Xi himself.

The anti-corruption drive has been the central policy of this administration and its duration and severity have surprised almost everyone, not least the bureaucrats who have been its primary targets.

Party officials have been targeted throughout the country and in sectors ranging from finance to food production. Mr Zhou’s former fiefdoms in state security, Sichuan province and the energy sector have, at least initially, been a particular focus.

The impact has been most severe on the operations of state-owned enterprises but global companies have also been hit, including pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, accused of bribery at its China operations by China’s police. Luxury brands including Swiss watchmakers, LVMH, Rémy Cointreau and Diageo, which have seen sales slump in China as officials became more reluctant to accept gifts and bribes.

At China National Petroleum Co, the state-owned parent of listed PetroChina, so many senior executives have been detained that the company has established a reporting system in which top officials check in with department heads daily, according to Chinese media reports.

If any of them drop out of contact they are assumed to have been detained by the CCDI and are replaced the following day by a preapproved successor.

This arrangement reflects the extraordinary power wielded by the CCDI, a highly secretive extralegal body that has no formal right to arrest or press charges but which can investigate and indefinitely detain any of China’s 87m Communist party members.

In practice, the CCDI is regularly accused of brutality, particularly towards lower-level cadres.

Since early 2013, nearly 70 officials have committed suicide or died in custody after coming under investigation.

Yet until Mr Wang took over, CCDI officials were renowned as some of the most corrupt in China and the body is still widely regarded as a political tool for taking down rivals within the system.

Even Mr Wang himself has hinted at the need for a more robust and institutionalised system to tackle endemic corruption.

● Born: 1948

● 1969: sent to peasant commune during Cultural Revolution where he meets his wife, daughter of top Chinese official Yao Yilin

● 1970s: studies history and works in museum in Xi’an at the time famous terracotta warriors are discovered nearby

● 1980s: rises rapidly with help of father-in-law and the favour of reform-minded senior leaders

● 1990s: works as vice-governor of the central bank and leads China Construction Bank, which sets up first Chinese investment bank in a joint venture with Morgan Stanley

● Late 1990s: sent to clean up the mess following biggest bankruptcy in Chinese history

● 2003: recalled to handle the Sars crisis as Beijing mayor and prepare the city for the 2008 Olympics

● 2007: joins 25-member Politburo that runs China as vice-premier in charge of the economy, energy and finance. Put in charge of China’s response to global financial crisis

● 2012: named to seven-man Politburo Standing Committee and appointed head of Communist party’s top anti-corruption watchdog

“Our current task is to alleviate the symptoms [of corruption] in order to give us time to eventually cure the underlying disease,” he said in a speech late last year on the CCDI’s anti-corruption efforts under his watch.

When he was named to head the body in late 2012, Beijing politicos joked it was because he had no children, since many of the offspring of senior Chinese leaders have amassed enormous fortunes in the past few decades.

A more serious explanation is that Mr Wang is not seen as a member of any one faction but has been close to various top leaders over the years.

His powerful father-in-law, Yao Yilin, was one of the senior cadres responsible for ordering the tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the “princeling” status this relationship confers on him was crucial in Mr Wang’s rise.

But it was his ability, and his willingness to say what he really thought in a system that encourages sycophancy, that endeared him to China’s leadership in the 1990s and gained him a reputation as the party’s “chief of the fire brigade”.

As head of China Construction Bank in the mid-1990s he created the country’s first real investment bank in a joint venture with Morgan Stanley and in the late 1990s he oversaw the $4bn bankruptcy of state-owned Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corp in the heavily indebted province of Guangdong.

In 2003, when the Sars epidemic hit Beijing, Mr Wang was parachuted in as mayor to deal with the crisis and when the 2008 financial crisis struck he was again put in charge of China’s response.

Mr Wang has often been Beijing’s point-man in tricky negotiations with Europe and the US, and he tells people that his favourite television show is House of Cards, the intrigue-laden US political drama starring Kevin Spacey.

Henry Paulson, former US Treasury secretary, who worked with Mr Wang closely during the financial crisis and on the Guangdong bankruptcies in the 1990s when he was at Goldman Sachs, describes him as “an avid historian [who] enjoys philosophical debates and has a wicked sense of humour”.

These traits prompted Mr Wang two years ago to recommend all his colleagues at the top of the Communist party read Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Ancien Regime and the French Revolution.

Old friends of his say Mr Wang’s choice of reading material was meant to send several messages – that attempts at reform may lead to unintended consequences but also that resisting reform can leave the ruling elite with their heads chopped off.

Additional Reporting by Gu Yu