Former Communist Party chief of Hangzhou to face trial on bribery charges
- Zhou Jiangyong, 54, is accused of taking advantage of his positions by accepting huge bribes for almost two decades
- He was expelled from the party in January, accused of supporting ‘disorderly expansion’ of private companies
According to the Xinhua report, 54-year-old Zhou is accused of taking advantage of his positions by accepting huge bribes for almost two decades.
The report said this was alleged to have begun almost as soon as Zhou landed a job as deputy chief of a small county in Zhejiang, and that he had allegedly continued to take bribes when he became a senior leader in the province.
He is accused of using “the convenience of his position and power, the actions of other state officials, to seek illegal benefits for some people”, the report said.
Zhou was one of the officials featured in a five-part series on corruption aired by state broadcaster CCTV in January. He was shown confessing that he had lost faith in the party’s ideals and that he had colluded with relatives to engage in “family-style corruption”.
Zhou began his working life as a teacher at a middle school in a county of Ningbo, in Zhejiang, and went on to become general secretary of the county’s Communist Youth League committee.
He has spent his entire political career in Zhejiang – one of China’s most prosperous provinces, in the east of the country. Zhou was party secretary of the city of Zhoushan and then Wenzhou before he took up the top job in Hangzhou in May 2018.
Hangzhou is the provincial capital and is known for its e-commerce and technology businesses, and a booming private sector.
The investigation into Zhou was announced just two days after another Hangzhou official, Ma Xiaohui, had surrendered to anti-corruption investigators. Ma, the former party secretary of Huzhou, was suspected of “serious violations of discipline and law”, according to state media reports.
