China charges two senior officials linked to disgraced security tsar Zhou Yongkang
Two senior Chinese officials with close ties to disgraced security tsar Zhou Yongkang have been formally charged with taking bribes, China’s top prosecuting body said on Friday.
Former deputy national police chief Li Dongsheng took advantage of his positions at state broadcaster CCTV, the Ministry of Public Security and the party’s Central Politics and Law Commission to seek benefits for others in exchange for huge profits, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate said in a statement on its website on Friday.
In a separate statement, the top procuratorate said former Hainan vice-governor Ji Wenlin had committed the same crime during his tenures at the general office of the Sichuan provincial party standing committee, the general office of the Ministry of Public Security and the Haikou government in Hainan province.
The statements did not mention the amount of bribes the two senior officials took.
Li’s and Ji’s cases will be heard separately at two intermediate people’s courts in Tianjin. No specific dates of their trials were given.
The two are close associates of Zhou, who was in June sentenced to life in prison for taking bribes, abusing his power and intentionally leaking state secrets. Zhou, who is the most senior official to receive such a heavy sentence since the Cultural Revolution, was also tried in Tianjin.
Li, 59, was appointed vice-minister of public security in 2009 despite lacking any previous law enforcement experience. At the time, Zhou was secretary of the party’s Central Politics and Law Commission, which oversees the Ministry of Public Security.
Li spent 22 years working at CCTV, eventually rising to deputy chief of the state broadcaster. He served as vice-minister of the party’s propaganda department before securing the public security post.
Ji, 49, served as Zhou’s top aide for a decade during the late 1990s and early 2000s. He has been close to Zhou since the late 1990s, when Zhou led the Ministry of Land and Resources.
Ji, a geologist, was Zhou’s secretary and a researcher. Zhou took Ji along when he became Sichuan party boss in 1999, making him deputy director of the general office of the provincial party committee.
When Zhou ascended to the powerful post of public security minister in 2003, he made Ji his secretary and a deputy director of the ministry’s general office. In July 2008, Ji was named deputy director of a ministerial group tasked with maintaining social stability, but moved back to the land ministry five months later.
Ji was elevated to become Hainan’s deputy governor in 2013, after a stint as deputy party chief of the provincial capital Haikou.
