Staff Reporter
February 15, 2015
Jiang Mianheng announces that he will step down as the chief of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai branch on Feb. 6, 2015. (Photo courtesy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences)
There is growing speculation that China’s anti-graft authorities could target Jiang Mianheng, the son of former president and Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin, as President Xi Jinping’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign zones in on state-owned enterprises and the financial sector, reports Duowei News, a US-based Chinese-language political news outlet.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the country’s top anti-graft watchdog, recently announced that it will commence its first round of inspections for 2015 following the Chinese New Year break commencing next week. New targets will include 26 state-owned enterprises such as the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which has already seen numerous past and present officials fall from grace over the past two years.
The CCDI also announced a list of problems identified as specific targets during previous inspections, including problems with appointments and promotions at state-owned China Radio International, China State Shipbuilding Corporation and China Huadian Corporation.
Political observers, however, have zoned in on the problem of “exchanges of money and sex for power” identified at China Unicom, as the state-owned telecommunications giant is said to have links to Jiang Mianheng, whose father ruled China until 2003 and still wields considerable political clout in the party.
The CCDI’s announcement comes just as Jiang Mianheng, 63, stepped down from his role as president of the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) last month, stating that he is getting on in years.
Jiang Mianheng previously served as one of the vice presidents of the CAS until November 2011, when he was stripped of his post and accused of bribery and embezzlement in a stock bidding scandal and the misallocation of public funds. It is believed that he was cleared of any wrongdoing as he was not expelled from the academy and went on to become president of its Shanghai branch.
Several media reports have alleged that two high-ranking China Unicom officials probed for corruption at the end of last year — Zhang Zhijiang and Zong Xinhua – are confidants of Jiang Mianheng. There is also a rumor that Jiang Mianheng has been the behind-the-scenes controller of China Unicom since its 2008 merger with China Netcom, a company he co-founded.
While such rumors are regularly criticized for being “irresponsible,” many of them have eventually proven to hold water, Duowei said, adding that many rumours of corruption continue to plague China Unicom despite the CCDI having completed its inspections of the company last year.
Deciding how to control China’s powerful “princeling faction” – the offspring of the Communist Party elite – has continued to be a major headache for Beijing, Duowei said.
According to Duowei, former party general secretary Hu Yaobang, whose death sparked the student democracy in Tiananmen Square in 1989, was one of few Chinese leaders who dared to go up against the princelings by calling for a corruption probe into the son of former Politburo Standing Committee member Hu Qiaomu. Hu Yaobang’s son still believes to this day that his father’s attack on the princeling faction was one of the contributing factors to his forced resignation in 1987, Duowei added.
