HONG KONG -- The Communist Party chief of Guangzhou, one of China's most populous and richest cities, has been held for investigation by the party's anti-corruption agency, state-run media announced Friday, one day after he admonished city officials to embrace President Xi Jinping's campaign against lax discipline.
The abrupt downfall of the official, Wan Qingliang, stood out from some other recent prominent investigations over graft allegations because Wan still held a position of considerable power and was not in the twilight of his career. He was the most powerful functionary of Guangzhou, a sprawling city of some 13 million long-term residents that is the capital of Guangdong province, a pillar of manufacturing and exports in southern China.
Wan was the mayor of Guangzhou, long called Canton in English, from 2010 to 2011, when he became the city's party secretary, a more powerful post in China, where party rank is all-important. Wan also sat on Guangdong's Standing Committee, the party body that steers the province and its 106 million people.
As is almost always the case when such inquiries are first announced, the party's anti-corruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, issued a single-sentence statement about Wan's downfall. It gave no details of his alleged misdeeds.
"Wan Qingliang is suspected of grave violations of discipline and the law and is now under investigation by the organization," the commission said on its website. In China, party investigations into corruption usually precede any legal inquiry, so party leaders decide whether to subject a fallen official to criminal trial and punishment.
But there is little likelihood that, having been publicly accused of such abuses, Wan can escape the usual course of such investigations: a party report finding him culpable, followed by a police inquiry, indictment, trial and a prison sentence.
Vows to stamp out corruption have long been part of Chinese leaders' rhetoric, but Xi, who also is the Communist Party general secretary, has appeared determined to root out the worst abuses, which have fanned deep public anger with officials. He has vowed to take down both "flies and tigers" -- junior and high-ranked officials who take bribes, steal assets, and illicitly enrich themselves and their families.
Politics in Guangdong province have long been complicated by its distance from Beijing and its distinctive Cantonese language and mores, which have made it more difficult for Mandarin-speaking officials sent from northern China to fit in. The result has been unusually complex and capricious factional maneuvering.
Wan, 50, was born in Guangdong and rose through the province party apparatus, taking posts in several cities there before being appointed deputy party secretary of Guangzhou in 2010. In early 2011, he won media attention in China when he said he was too frugal to buy a house.
Unlike Beijing and Shanghai, Guangzhou does not answer directly to central leaders in Beijing; it answers to Guangdong province. But it is often grouped with those two cities as among China's most economically and politically powerful conurbations.
Several other Guangdong officials have also been placed under investigation over accusations of corruption since last year, including Cao Jianliao, a former vice mayor of Guangzhou.
A day before Wan's downfall, he oversaw one of the party rituals that Xi has revived: a meeting to immerse cadres in a "mass line" campaign intended to instill traditional communist virtues and root out the sources of corruption and ideological laxity.
Party committee secretaries, Wan said, should set an example of "writing out materials comparing and examining themselves," the Guangzhou Daily reported Friday.
A Section on 06/28/2014