In July 2020, Chen Yixin, general secretary of the Central Committee for Political and Legal Affairs of the Communist Party of China, warned: “You have to scrape the poison to the bone. “ A few months earlier had started a series of purges targeting the police, the judiciary and the state security apparatus. The heart of power. These men whose Party Secretary General Xi Jinping demands “Absolute loyalty, absolute purity, absolute reliability”, in the words of Zhao Kezhi, the all-powerful Minister of Public Security. This campaign has claimed two new victims, not mere “Flies” but real “Tigers”, to use an image used by the Chinese president himself: Sun Lijun, ex-deputy minister of public security, and Fu Zhenghua, ex-minister of justice.
Two formidable men. During his career, the former harshly suppressed members of the Falun Gong sect and then served as Hong Kong Affairs Director in the Ministry of Public Security. In February 2020, he was part of the shock team sent urgently to Wuhan to manage the pandemic. We had also seen Sun Lijun alongside Xi Jinping. This did not prevent him from being arrested a month later. But it was only on September 30 that we learned of the facts with which he is accused: “Decadent life”, ” corruption “, but above all “Disproportionate political ambitions” and “Formation of gangs and factions (…) causing extreme danger to political security [du Parti] “.
Observers still wondered about the gravity of the charges against him when, on October 2, the Party’s Central Control and Discipline Committee announced the opening of an investigation against the second man, Fu Zhenghua. Director of Beijing Public Security from 2010 to 2013 then Deputy Minister of Public Security from 2013 to 2018, he is considered to be one of the main people responsible for the arrest of hundreds of lawyers specializing in the defense of human rights. man, in July 2015. He was arrested for “Serious violation of discipline and national laws”. We don’t know any more. The man was said to be loyal to Xi Jinping. He even played an important role in the arrest in 2014 of Zhou Yongkang, Minister of Public Security from 2002 to 2007, the first member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the heart of power, to “fall” for corruption.
Jiang Zemin’s relatives
The two “purged” undoubtedly pay the fact of having been close to Jiang Zemin, President of the Republic from 1993 to 2003, and of the “Shanghai clique”, city of which this former Chinese number one was the mayor. “Xi Jinping only trusts those who have long served in his faction, that is to say the cadres of Fujian, Zhejiang [deux provinces où Xi a travaillé avant d’être nommé à Pékin] and Shaanxi [où il a passé son enfance]. Apparently, he believes that Fu has maintained ties with Jiang’s faction and with Zhou Yongkang’s clique ”, decrypts Willy Lam, political scientist from Hong Kong.
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