The anti-corruption campaign in China led by Communist Party leader Xi Jinping shows no signs of slowing down, with the recent removal of a provincial official who once penned a self-criticism letter while the Party boss himself looked on.
Zhou Benshun, the Party secretary of Hebei, a heavily populated and industrialized province that surrounds the capital Beijing, was put under investigation on Friday, July 24, according to a terse announcement by the regime’s disciplinary watchdog.
Even his closest colleagues appeared blindsided by the news, which was published after close of business on Friday. “Hebei officialdom was stunned,” wrote Caixin, a business publication with close ties to the current leadership. On the very day of Zhou’s arrest, he had presided over a meeting about development of the Jing-Jin-Ji megacity that is to surround Beijing.
“Who would have thought that that very evening the news would come out that he'd been arrested,” Caixin quotes an official saying.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party’s watchdog, rarely spells out the actual reasons for its actions.
Its note on Zhou merely said that he was being investigated for violations of “discipline” and the law, shedding little real light on what Zhou was actually guilty of, and why it was only now—as the Party’s anti-corruption campaign appears to be at a lull—that the news was announced.
But if official organs were reluctant to spell it out, China’s online media portals were given free reign to do so. Tencent Finance published the headline “The felling of provincial secretary Zhou Benshun bears the indelible mark of ‘Tiger Zhou.’”
The reference, of course, is to Zhou Yongkang, the Communist Party’s former security boss who was himself sentenced to life in prison just last month.
