In the midst of the biggest bankruptcy in Chinese history in 1998, Wang Qishan, the Communist party official in charge of the process, received a visit from an old friend with a warning.
“I tried to tell him just how powerful these bankers were and how close their ties were to top political leaders and I said how worried I was about their reaction if he forced them to take such huge losses,” the friend and former colleague, Huang Jiangnan, told the Financial Times. “He just told me to stop speaking and insisted he had to persevere. He is really a very resolute and insistent person.”
A decade and a half later, the chain-smoking, straight-talking former historian will need all the resolve he can muster as he confronts far more implacable enemies in his role as China’s anti-corruption tsar.