China Briefing | How could a con artist rise to the heart of China’s justice system?
Amid the many senior officials to have fallen to President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign, Lu Enguang stands out like few others – highlighting a worrying failure of the Communist Party’s vetting system
Back in the early 1990s, Lu Enguang was a peasant turned small time entrepreneur in a village in Shandong, China, who had made his first pot of gold by selling school drawing instruments and double-glazed drinking glasses to students.
But Lu, in his 30s, harboured a grand ambition that sounded more like a pipe dream then: he wanted to become a high-ranking official who would bring honour to his ancestors and family. In his own words, “there is nothing like being an official who can bring status”.
Nearly 25 years later, the pipe dream came true when, in 2015, he was appointed as the head of the political department at the Ministry of Justice and a member of the ministry’s leading party group with a rank of deputy government minister.
In May, the party leadership announced Lu had been expelled from the party, dismissed from public office and turned over to the criminal prosecution for graft and other illegal activities.