Coronavirus: Comrade Xi Jinping takes out the trash ahead of purge

Xi Jinping inspecti a centre for disease control and prevention in Beijing this week. Picture: AP

Even by Xi Jinping’s standards, it was quite a purge.

News of the first chop came just before I set off in my surgical facemask to get lunch at one of the few cafes still open in my neighbourhood in Beijing.

The Chinese Communist Party-controlled Xinhua news outfit reported that Jiang Chaoliang was no longer the party secretary of Hubei, the epicentre of a global health emergency and the biggest political crisis of Xi’s eight years in power. I was still to order — after, of course, my temperature was checked — when Xinhua announced a second casualty from high up the ranks of the CCP. Ma Guoqiang was no longer the Communist Party leader of Hubei’s capital, Wuhan.

Purgings at that seniority don’t happen every day in party general secretary and President Xi’s highly ordered China.

Jiang sits, or rather sat, on the party’s central committee, making him one of the 300 or so most powerful people in a nation of 1.4 billion.

Once a chairman at the state-controlled Agricultural Bank of China, Jiang was appointed by the party to oversee Hubei in late 2016, well into Xi’s reign.

His dismissal is the first over bad performance at the rank of party provincial or municipal secretary level during Xi’s eight years in power. The others to fall since the 18th party congress in 2012 — which, by my count, number seven — were all related to corruption investigations.

There was speculation about a link between the removal and the almost 10-fold increase in numbers of new cases of COVID-19 in Hubei, which was announced earlier on Thursday.

One mid-level Beijing banker reckoned the huge spike in cases looked a lot like the trash was being taken out to prepare things for Jiang’s replacement, Ying Yong, who was the mayor of Shanghai and is known as a Xi guy. “When a new boss steps into a bank, he must disclose bad debts leftover by his predecessor so he wouldn’t bear the old debt in his new job,” explained the banker.

Even a die-hard capitalist in the CCP’s arch-rival Washington could understand such a communist scheme.