Early in his tenure as the Chinese Communist party’s formidable new anti-graft tsar, Wang Qishan met a group of young cadres. “If you want to succeed in politics you cannot be obsessed with either money or women,” he said to his mostly male audience, according to a person who attended the meeting.
Mr Wang was deadly serious. As head of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection over the past five years, he ended the careers of more than 150 “tiger” officials with vice-minister rank or higher. They were typically charged with bribery and “trading power for sex”, expelled from the party and handed to the courts for summary convictions and long prison sentences.
Mr Wang’s own career ended on Tuesday when he was not named to the new Central Committee appointed by the party’s 19th congress. That made him ineligible for a second five-year term on the party’s most powerful body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and brought the curtain down on one of the most remarkable and distinguished careers in modern Chinese politics.