Senior anti-corruption official to lead China’s main spy organization

November 8, 2016 by Joseph Fitsanakis

A senior Chinese official with a leading role in the country’s ongoing anti-corruption crusade has been appointed head of the nation’s spy agency, which has undergone extensive purges in recent years. Chen Wenqing, 56, will be replacing Geng Huichang as Minister of State Security. Geng, 65, will be retiring after nearly a decade at the helm of China’s intelligence and security agency, which is responsible for intelligence collection, counterintelligence and political security. Chen’s appointment was approved on Monday by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. It comes a year after he was appointed as the senior Communist Party representative at the Ministry of State Security.

Chen, a native of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, joined the police force at a young age and rose through the ranks to become the local director of the Ministry of State Security’s local field office. After eight years in that post, he was appointed provincial director of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the Communist Party’s agency responsible for combating corruption among Party apparatchiks. In 2012, Chen became the youngest-ever deputy director of the CCDI, working under the commission’s chairman, Wang Qishan. From that post, Chen helped lead a massive anti-corruption campaign that resulted in the purging of over 100 senior Communist Party officials on charges of dishonesty and sleaze. Those purged included several senior officials at Ministry of State Security. Among them was Zhou Yongkang, Secretary of China’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which oversees the country’s security, intelligence and law enforcement institutions. The crackdown also targeted the deputy director of the Ministry of State Security, Ma Jian, and its once-powerful Beijing director, Liang Ke.

In recent years, several officials from the CCDI, who are seen by many as uncorrupted and incorruptible, have filled the positions of former Ministry of State Security bureaucrats who were fired during the government’s anti-corruption campaign. Chens’ appointment makes him the third senior CCDI official to be appointed to a senior post in the Ministry of State Security. Some experts believe that Chen’s move affirms the growing power of the CCDI, which has been the main implementation vehicle of President Xi Jinping’s ongoing anticorruption campaign that has gripped China since his rise to power in 2012.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 08 November 2016 | Permalink