The sudden disappearance in July last year of Gao Songtao, the bespectacled former vice-president of government fund manager Sino IC Capital, was a warning of a coming storm.
Months later, the Chinese Communist party’s internal watchdog confirmed that Gao had been under investigation for corruption. Yet it was not President Xi Jinping’s public campaign to eliminate graft from financial markets that was behind the detention.
Instead, the deeply feared and highly secretive Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had been running a different operation. The target: China’s massive semiconductor sector and what has been happening to the Rmb340bn ($47bn) raised to invest in it.