Top adviser in Guangdong faces probe

Anti-graft investigation is second involving a high provincial official this year

Zhu Mingguo

The top political adviser in Guangdong province is being investigated for serious violations of Party discipline, according to a statement released on the website of the Party’s top anti-graft body on Friday.

Zhu Mingguo, chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, has become the second senior Party and government official to be investigated in Guangdong in six months, following Wan Qingliang, former Party chief of Guangzhou.

Insiders said Zhu’s case will raise concerns at home and abroad and rock the political arena in prosperous Guangdong, a window of reform and opening-up to the outside world.

Zhu, a ministerial official, is the highest ranking official to be investigated in Guangdong this year. Wan was a deputy ministerial official.

Wan has been expelled from the Party and dismissed from public office and is now facing prosecution.

Wan, 50, who was taken away by anti-graft officials from the central government at the end of June, was also suspected of having accepted large bribes while he was in office.

Zhu is the second top political adviser to be investigated in Guangdong, which borders the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions.

Chen Shaoji, former chairman of the Guangdong committee of the CPPCC, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for accepting bribes in July 2010.

The statement from the top anti-graft body did not give details about Zhu’s case on Friday.

Zhu, who was born in Wuzishan, Hainan province, in May 1957, is a member of the Li ethnic group.

He was once deputy Party chief of Guangdong and was secretary of the Guangdong Party Commission for Discipline Inspection before taking office as the top political adviser of the province in 2013.

Before Zhu was transferred to Guangdong in 2006, he was a member of the standing committee of the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the CPC and director of the Chongqing Municipal Bureau of Public Security from 2001 to 2006. Zhu was also deputy governor of Hainan province from 1998 to 2001.