More than 100 top executives from some of China’s largest state-owned enterprises have been detained on suspicion of corruption since the start of last year, according to official statistics.
Since the beginning of 2014, authorities have publicly named 115 C-suite officials from state groups including global giants such as PetroChina, China Southern Airlines, China Resources, FAW and Sinopec, who have been placed under investigation for graft.
Because virtually all of them are also senior Communist party officials, they have mostly disappeared into the feared system of internal party “discipline inspection”, where they can be held indefinitely without trial and where torture is believed to be rife.