WHEN in 2016 a senior Chinese policeman was elected president of Interpol—an international agency that helps police to co-ordinate across borders—state media portrayed the event as a vote of confidence in China’s justice system and a milestone in the country’s rise. Yet less than two years after he took office, the presidency of Meng Hongwei (pictured, left, at an Interpol meeting in Beijing last year) has come to a chilling end.

Chinese officials took the 64-year-old into custody in late September, after he flew back to China for what was supposed to be a short trip away from Interpol’s headquarters in the French city of Lyon. They did not admit that they had done so until October 7th, and only after Interpol had issued a statement saying that its president’s whereabouts were unknown.

It had been a strange few days, during which all that was known was that Mr Meng’s wife, Grace, had reported him missing to French police. On October 7th she appeared before reporters in Lyon, keeping her back to the cameras in order to hide her face. She showed the journalists an emoji of a knife that had been sent from her husband’s WhatsApp account shortly after he arrived in China. She said she had understood the message as a sign that he was in danger, and that she had heard nothing from him since. French officials said Ms Meng and her two children were under police protection, having received a threatening call. Interpol said Mr Meng had resigned.

It will probably never be known how long China would have waited before announcing Mr Meng’s arrest had not his wife and employer expressed their concerns about him in public. On October 8th China’s Ministry of Public Security released a report of a pre-dawn meeting that day of its Communist Party committee. It quoted participants as saying that Mr Meng was being investigated for allegedly taking bribes and for other unspecified wrongdoing. They said that Mr Meng’s detention was evidence that no one was above the law, and that Mr Meng had “only himself to blame” for his difficulties. Attendees agreed on the need to “maintain a high level of conformity with the political stance, the political direction and the political principles of the party centre” with the country’s leader, Xi Jinping (pictured, right) at the centre’s “core”. Such emphatic language suggests that the case may involve allegations of political misbehaviour, not just of graft. “This is political ruin and fall!” Ms Meng said in a text message to the Associated Press, a news agency.

The hugger-mugger of Mr Meng’s arrest seemed a snub to an organisation that is supposed to respect and promote due process—and to the delegates whom China had persuaded to elect its man as Interpol’s president (he was the first Chinese citizen to hold the post). Yet in the context of Mr Xi’s long-running campaign against corruption, Mr Meng’s treatment is not peculiar. Interpol’s chiefs retain their old government jobs while on secondment to Lyon. As a serving vice-minister of public security, Mr Meng is not immune to proceedings instigated by superiors in his home country.

Since Mr Xi took over as China’s leader in 2012 hundreds of thousands of officials have been jailed or otherwise punished, ostensibly for their involvement in graft. In some cases the charges have appeared aimed at neutering political rivals as much as cleaning up the party. Until recently, the usual practice was to detain suspects using a system known as shuanggui, an extra-legal form of arrest that allowed party members to be held in secret for months. At the start of this year shuanggui was replaced with an alternative investigatory process managed by a new branch of government, the National Supervision Commission (NSC). Mr Meng is the most senior official known to have been detained by this body.

Power unleashed

One reason for the creation of the NSC was supposedly to impose some legal restraint on the party’s powers to discipline its own 90m members. Yet the new body has ended up with greater powers than the shadowy system it replaced. The organisation can investigate wrongdoing not just among party members but among all managers working in public service. This triples the number of people at risk of arbitrary detention. The NSC’s agents may hold people in places of the party’s choosing for up to six months. Investigators do not have to inform relatives or employers, should officials believe that doing so might hinder their inquiries. Nor are they required to allow access to a lawyer.

There are various theories about why the party initially chose to deal with Mr Meng in the secretive way it did. One is that China’s leaders are uninterested in, or possibly ignorant of, how the country’s anti-corruption procedures appear to foreigners, including those who run Interpol and other international organisations that China would like its citizens to lead. Officials may be wagering that, once clearer evidence is presented of Mr Meng’s alleged corruption, their decision to detain him so furtively will appear more understandable. Or they may simply reckon that China can continue to cajole countries into supporting its candidates for big international jobs, regardless of how well or badly its government behaves. There has been speculation that China’s leaders are unhappy that Mr Meng did not do a better job of persuading Interpol to do China’s bidding. They were angered by Interpol’s decision in February to cancel a long-standing “red notice” (an alert that someone is wanted by a member country’s police) for Dolkun Isa, a prominent campaigner on behalf of China’s oppressed Uighur Muslim minority who lives in Germany.

Another theory is that China is acutely aware of what foreigners think and regrets that it had to waste political capital abroad by making Mr Meng disappear. If indeed they felt they had no choice but to act so furtively, that would lend weight to speculation that Mr Meng’s disgrace has less to do with common-or-garden corruption and more with some kind of high-stakes political struggle unfolding in Beijing. The report published by Mr Meng’s ministry associated him with the “pernicious influence” of Zhou Yongkang, a former security chief who since 2015 has been serving a life sentence for corruption and who is widely believed to have opposed Mr Xi’s rise to power. Referring to him and other high-ranking jailed officials, Mr Xi said in 2016 that senior people in the party had engaged in “political conspiracies”. Early this summer rumours began to circulate that Mr Xi may be facing resistance from political rivals irked by his decision to revise the constitution in a way that allows him to retain power indefinitely, instead of for a maximum of ten years.

None of these interpretations reflects well on the party. At best China unwittingly persuaded Interpol’s members to elect someone of dubious character, despite criticism from human-rights activists who warned that appointing a policeman from a country with such a weak commitment to the rule of law would be a mistake. At worst China has embarrassed Interpol by allowing the party’s toxic political struggles to interfere with the body’s management. China’s leaders like to argue that the West is intent on slowing their country’s rise as a respected global power. The evidence suggests that the party is perfectly capable of doing that all by itself.