The ex-coal miner who led ICBC out of the dark ages
After turning Industrial and Commercial Bank of China into the world’s biggest bank, chairman Jiang Jianqing is retiring
The public face of mainland China’s state-backed banking system, chairman Jiang Jianqing, is retiring after more than 16 years at the helm of what is now the world’s biggest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC).
He rescued the bank from de facto insolvency – nearly half of ICBC’s loans were risky in 1999 before it offloaded a huge trunk of bad debts to an asset management vehicle – and turned it into the world’s biggest lender by assets, market valuation and profits.
The bespectacled, softly spoken Jiang, a former coal miner and bank teller, became a heavyweight in the global banking industry. His counterpart in negotiations a decade ago, then Goldman Sachs chief executive Henry Paulson, decribed Jiang as “bold and brash” in his book Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower, published last year.
Jiang, 63, is a member of the first generation of Chinese bankers to have a global impact, transforming mainland banks from dull, state-directed institutions into money-making behemoths on the back of China’s historic economic rise and state protection of its banking market.
On the one hand, they had to answer to the Communist Party and lend to questionable projects, and on the other they had to deliver top line and bottom line growth to investors every quarter. On top of that, they had to operate carefully in a business where money is interwoven with power. Some of Jiang’s early counterparts, such as former Bank of China president Wang Xuebing and former China Construction Bank head Zhang Enzhao, have ended up in jail for corruption.