‘Political survivor’ who worked under disgraced Bo Xilai named new Nanjing party boss
Wu Zhenglong, who also worked with corrupt Shanxi Gang, climbs career ladder after weathering political storms
A survivor of political storms in Chongqing and Shanxi has been appointed the deputy Communist Party chief of China’s affluent eastern province of Jiangsu as well as the top party official of its capital, Nanjing.
The appointment of Wu Zhenglong, 52, the outgoing party secretary of the Shanxi provincial capital Taiyuan, to Jiangsu was reported by Nanjing Daily Wednesday afternoon, confirming a South China Morning Post report.
A source in Shanxi said Wu’s move would pave the way for the rest of his career.
Wu is one of the few direct subordinates of disgraced Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai to survive the political aftermath of Bo’s downfall and move up the political ladder. Many of his former Chongqing colleagues were purged in the fallout.
Wu was “parachuted” into Taiyuan as party chief and a standing member of the provincial party committee in August 2014 amid an intense anti-graft crackdown that brought down many officials in Shanxi.
Suffering from a “landslide of corruption”, the party’s standing committee in the resource-rich province lost members in 2014, including Chen Chuanping, the former Taiyuan party boss.
Most of these officials were removed before Wu arrived, but the crackdown continued afterwards.
