A widening corruption scandal in China’s southern economic powerhouse of Guangdong Province has snared two senior anti-graft officials in the boomtown of Shenzhen, a newspaper reported yesterday.
Anti-graft officers from Beijing had taken into custody two officials from Shenzhen’s Discipline Inspection Commission last weekend, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported, citing unnamed sources. It did not name the officials.
This comes amid a deepening investigation into alleged financial misconduct by Huang Guangyu (黃光裕), the Guangdong-born founder of GOME Electrical Appliances (國美電器控股), which has also led to the detention of two senior officials with Guangdong links.
GOME is China’s top electronics retailer.
Corruption investigations in China can be proxies for political struggles, with some analysts saying the latest campaign appeared to be orchestrated by Guangdong’s party chief Wang Yang (汪洋), a Beijing-backed outsider who took up the job around two years ago.
“There had been a political battle between Mr Wang and the Guangdong clique of officials. And Mr Wang had won,” the South China Morning Post reported, citing Shenzhen-based political analyst Zhu Jianguo (朱建國).
The province’s top political adviser, Chen Shaoji (陳紹基), and the former head of Guangdong’s anti-corruption body, Wang Huayuan, had been put under shuanggui (雙規) a form of party discipline before being turned over to prosecutors, the Post reported.
Chen and Wang Huayuan (王華元) — who now heads a disciplinary body in eastern Zhejiang Province — had both been detained for investigation in relation to Huang’s case, China’s respected Caijing magazine reported.
The two detained Shenzhen officials were related to Wang Huayuan’s case as they had been his subordinates, the Post said.
It added that many local officials and scholars considered the cases of Chen and Wang Huayuan to be “the most significant in Guangdong in at least 30 years.”
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
‘TOXIC CLIMATE’: ‘I don’t really recognize Labour anymore... The idea that you can implement far-right ideas in order to stop the far right is nonsense,’ a protester said Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched through central London to protest against the far right, weeks ahead of local elections and six months after Britain saw one of its largest far-right demonstrations. Organized by hundreds of civic groups, including trade unions, anti-racism campaigners and Muslim representative bodies, Saturday’s Together Alliance event was billed as the biggest in UK history to counter right-wing extremism. A separate pro-Palestinian march had also converged with the main rally. While organizers claimed 500,000 had turned out in total, the police gave a figure of about 50,000. Protesters carrying placards with slogans such as
RSS