‘Shameless’ former internet czar Lu Wei expelled from Communist Party
Chinese discipline inspectors have provided a colorful laundry list of Lu’s various misdeeds
It appears that China’s discipline authorities are trying hard to wrap up their work before the Chinese New Year kicks off, announcing that the country’s internet czar has been expelled from the Communist Party after he was placed under investigation for corruption late last year.
Lu Wei, 57, was the head of the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China for three years until he surprisingly stepped aside as the man in charge of the country’s internet in June 2016.
More than a year later, China’s top anti-graft watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), finally announced the likely reason for his sudden departure, revealing that it had opened an investigation into Lu for “serious violations of party discipline.”
Earlier this evening, the CCDI released an extremely harshly-worded statement about Lu’s case, announcing that he had been expelled from the Communist Party and providing a very colorful laundry list of offenses.
The statement describes Lu as being a “shameless” man with a “swollen head” who had deceived the central government and severely violated party discipline standards.
Among other things, Lu is accused of frequenting private clubs, having an “arbitrary and tyrannical” leadership style, making false accusations against others, trading power for sex, trying to build his personal fame, and being “outwardly devoted, but inwardly opposed” to the party — not to mention using his political position to help out his friends and take huge amounts of property as bribes.
This is quite the fall from grace for Lu who made Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2015 following a high-profile tour of the US in December 2014 during which he met with a number of American tech titans. At his visit to the Facebook offices in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg infamously showed Lu his copy of Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China, praising the Chinese president’s book, adding that he had bought copies for his colleagues as well.
Lu was born in eastern Anhui province and managed to rise up the ranks by working at China’s official Xinhua news agency for two decades before going on to become a Beijing vice-mayor in 2011, overseeing the city’s publicity department. A strong proponent of so-called “internet sovereignty,” Lu won the job of China’s internet regulator by arguing that the party urgently needed to enforce more control on the internet and, in particular, social media, initiating an unprecedented widespread crackdown on online discussion that has continued with his successor.
At the Wuzhen Internet Conference in 2015, Lu denied the existence of internet censorship in China, saying: “It is a misuse of words if you say ‘content censorship.’ But no censorship does not mean there is no management. The Chinese government learned how to manage the internet from developed Western countries, we have not learned enough yet.”
Appropriately enough, discussion of Lu’s downfall last year was censored on Chinese social media.
