Tencent said Thursday that an executive was detained by Chinese authorities in connection with a personal corruption case, not related to the company’s social media software WeChat or WeChat. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that a Tencent executive was detained by Chinese officials in connection with a major corruption investigation. Sources said the Tencent executive was involved in the case of Sun Lijun, the former vice minister of public security who fell from power. Chinese authorities are investigating what information Tencent executive Zhang Feng shared with Sun Lijun and what Sun Lijun may have done with that information, the sources said.
Tencent said the executive was detained by Chinese authorities on suspicion of “personal” corruption, unrelated to the company’s Wechat, according to Reuters. But the Wall Street Journal said earlier that a Tencent executive had been detained by Chinese officials in connection with an investigation into a major corruption case. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the paper said Zhang Feng, a Tencent vice president, has been under investigation by China’s anti-corruption agency since last year for allegedly sharing personal information collected by WeChat without authorization.
But Tencent insists the investigation of the company’s executives is just a corruption case. In a statement sent to Reuters, Tencent said, “We can confirm that this case involves suspected personal corruption and has nothing to do with WeChat or WeChat,” Reuters said.
According to the U.S. media cited by Free Asia, Tencent executives were detained in connection with leaking WeChat data.
U.S. media outlet The Wall Street Journal cited sources familiar with the matter as saying that Zhang Feng, a Tencent vice president, has been under investigation by China’s anti-corruption agency since last year for allegedly sharing personal messages collected by WeChat without authorization and handing over the data to Sun Lijun, a former Chinese vice minister of public security who is under investigation in Beijing. Sources close to the investigation also said authorities are looking into what information Zhang Feng shared with Sun Lijun and what Sun Lijun may have done with the information.
Free Asia said the station had reported that Sun Lijun, who had a long history of secret public security missions, including the crackdown on Falun Gong and the 709 arrests, as well as a trip to Wuhan to guide the prevention and control of the new Epidemic, “fell from grace” last April on suspicion of serious disciplinary violations.
A statement released by the Zhangjiakou city government in Hebei province in 2018 referred to Zhang Feng as a vice president of Tencent and said he had met with Mayor Wu Weidong in late October of that year. But Tencent responded to foreign media by saying that Zhang Feng had not held a senior or managerial position at Tencent and that the case involved personal corruption allegations that had nothing to do with WeChat or the overseas version of WeChat. And Tencent Chairman Ma Huateng is not under investigation and is free to leave China.
Tencent Group is recently scrutinizing its own employees for bribery and corruption. The company’s fraud investigation department issued a communiqué on Feb. 2 this year, saying that since the fourth quarter of 2019, more than 100 people have been dismissed and never hired for violating Tencent’s “high pressure line” and more than 40 people have been transferred to public security authorities for suspected crimes. U.S. media Bloomberg reported that such a rare self-censorship shows that the Chinese government is taking an increasingly tough stance on investigating corruption among government cadres and companies.
The report cited the Wall Street Journal as saying that Zhang Feng’s case highlights the potential for several of China’s tech giants to be drawn into political battles at the top of the country’s power hierarchy, and that Beijing authorities are increasingly concerned that the data collection systems of Tencent and other tech giants pose a challenge to the ruling power of the Communist Party. Earlier this year, foreign media revealed that Chinese financial regulators had asked Jack Ma to share consumer credit information about Ant Group, and China recently issued new anti-monopoly rules for Internet platforms, speculating that the Chinese government is partly motivated by its attempts to regain control of users’ personal data.
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