To his admirers, Wang Qishan is the best premier China never had. Over the past four decades the 69-year-old head of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has built one of the most remarkable CVs in modern Chinese politics.
From his emergence as an influential young reformer in the early 1980s to his handling of trade and economic relations with the US during the global financial crisis, Mr Wang has played an important role in almost every pivotal financial and economic reform in modern Chinese history.
More recently he has stood out in a much more political post. Since late 2012 he has been, as some refer to him, “the handle on President Xi’s knife”. Under Mr Wang’s leadership, the ruling Communist party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has tormented government ministers, People’s Liberation Army generals and state-owned enterprise executives. His investigators have arrested more than 150 officials with vice-ministerial rank or higher — so-called “tigers” — for alleged corruption.