China Power | Politics | East Asia

Not Just the Military: Xi Jinping’s Other Senior Party Purge

Xi has ruthlessly gone after former Politburo Standing Committee member and one-time economic czar Wang Qishan.

In this Sep. 8, 2011 file photo, Wang Qishan (then the vice premier of China) attends a the China-Britain Business Council banquet in London, U.K.

Xi Jinping’s astounding purge of the senior leadership of the military is well documented, but another purge within the Chinese Communist Party has drawn less attention. Xi Jinping has ruthlessly gone after former Politburo Standing Committee member and one-time economic czar Wang Qishan. 

Xi has not charged Wang with any crime, but the latter lives under virtual house arrest in Beijing. Wang has not been referenced in the Chinese official media since October 2023. But, perhaps just as important, Xi has systematically purged Wang’s patronage network, which he built over the course of his party career. Just last month, Li Xiaohong, a former personal secretary to Wang and once the most important disciplinary official overseeing the China Securities Regulatory Commission, was placed under disciplinary investigation.

Xi’s decision to go after one of the most dependable Chinese Communist Party leaders, who even conducted Xi’s anticorruption campaigns, is probably intended to make sure that Wang and other elders within the Communist Party do not stand in the way of Xi’s ambitions for a fourth term as China’s unassailable leader at the 21st Party Congress next year. Historically, retired party elders have played outsized roles in influencing the selection of top leaders. For example, former Vice Premier Chen Yun played a pivotal role in selecting Jiang Zemin as China’s leader after the Tiananmen crisis.

Wang Qishan was at one time one of China’s most respected and influential economic leaders. His successes were legendary. He helped facilitate one of the World Bank’s first major loans to invest in China’s rural development and contributed to the establishment of China’s first stock market during the late 1980s. Working under then-Vice Premier Zhu Rongji in the 1990s, he helped establish China International Capital Corporation while heading China Construction Bank, which partnered with Morgan Stanley to create China’s first joint-venture investment bank. 

Wang guided China safely through the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. His door was always open to international visitors making him a bridge between China and the Western financial system. He was one of the last of the true economic reformers.

Perhaps as important, after leaving his economic posts to become China’s anticorruption czar, he left in place a patronage network of highly competent economic and banking officials. Many had been his subordinates for decades and continued his reformist approach to the Chinese economy. 

When I was serving on the U.S. National Security Council in September 2008, I saw firsthand how, when Lehman Brothers failed, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Wang helped contain the Global Financial Crisis. China agreed not to sell its large holdings in U.S. securities, giving Paulson time to find the means to contain the crisis and avoid a recession or even a depression. 

However, I sensed that........

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