What’s new: A former governor and party chief of South China’s Hainan province has turned himself in to authorities and is being investigated by the country’s top graft busters.
Luo Baoming, 71, is suspected of “serious violations of discipline and law,” the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a statement published late Thursday. The phrase is a common euphemism for corruption.
Luo last appeared in public on May 27, attending a Hainan provincial meeting as a retired official, according to a local newspaper report. Luo retired from the role of deputy head of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress in March 2023.
He is the first former party secretary of Hainan to fall under graft probe since the island, formerly a division of Guangdong, was officially made a province in 1988.
The background: Luo’s surrender came after Liu Xingtai, the vice chairman of Hainan’s legislature and former vice governor of the island, became a target of a graft probe in May.
Luo, a native of Tianjin municipality in North China, first served as a sergeant of Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, an economic and quasi-military organization that fulfilled governmental functions in the region until it was dissolved in 1975.
He then returned to his home city and worked his way up to become director of the Tianjin Municipal Commission of Commerce and later the head of the region’s party committee’s publicity department in the 1990s.
Luo was transferred to Hainan in 2001, appointed as governor in 2007 and party secretary in 2011.
Contact reporter Kelly Wang (jingzhewang@caixin.com) and editor Jonathan Breen (jonathanbreen@caixin.com)
