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.
No comments:
Post a Comment