China’s top graft-buster Wang Qishan: will he stay or will he go?

The future of Chinese anti-graft tsar Wang Qishan has become one of the hottest conversation topics in Beijing ahead of the Communist Party’s national congress this month.

Wang – party chief Xi Jinping’s right-hand man in an ongoing anti-corruption campaign that has claimed the scalps of many senior officials – has managed to maintain a relatively low profile in the past five years despite being viewed by many as China’s second most powerful man.

But even though he’s rarely spoken in public, the spotlight is now firmly on him, with most attention focused on whether he will retire in this month’s leadership reshuffle.

According to the party’s unwritten retirement rules, Wang, who turned 69 in July, is destined for retirement. But opinion in political circles is split, with some suggesting he might retain his seat on the Politburo Standing Committee after the party’s five-yearly national congress, expected to open on October 18.

If that happens, Wang will shatter a convention followed since 2002 that has seen all members of the party’s highest decision-making body aged 68 or older at the time of a party congress step down.

The unwritten rule formed the basis for the first orderly power transition in Chinese Communist Party history in 2002, when Jiang Zemin retired as party chief at the age of 74 along with every other member of the Politburo Standing Committee apart from Hu Jintao, Jiang’s successor, and was also strictly followed in the two subsequent leadership reshuffles – in 2007 and 2012