Shanxi boss Wang Rulin meets the hard graft questions head-on

The new Shanxi Communist Party boss appears eager to demonstrate his hands-on approach to graft-busting in a province that has been at the centre of the crackdown on corruption.

Wang Rulin, who served in northeastern Jilin province for more than four decades before moving to the coal-rich region in September, fielded all four questions on the anti-graft campaign asked by local reporters at Friday's meeting of the Shanxi delegation.

His governor, Li Xiaopeng, fielded the remaining five questions, about the economy and the coal industry.

Wang said corruption cases in Shanxi were related, like "clusters and clusters", and gave various reasons for their cause: officials weren't closely supervised and often "crossed the moral baseline", while the party did not rule strictly and had not investigated enough cadres.

He said one city had not investigated any party chief within 14 years, and its biggest case so far concerned an official who had misappropriated only 50,000 yuan (HK$62,000).

"Once we began to investigate, there was a batch of them … a landslide," Wang said.