On March 16, Beijing Time, the State Council of the Communist Party of China (CPC) appointed and removed state staff, removing Tian Jing from his post as the director of the State Secrets Bureau of the CPC. The new director of the State Secrets Bureau has no information and a mysterious background. The State Secrets Bureau is actually under the management of the General Office of the Central Government, and was subject to a major purge around the time of the fall of former Central Office Director Ling Plan.
The new director of the State Secrets Bureau was born in May 1960 and is a native of Mengcheng, Anhui province, and received his doctorate in science from the Institute of Acoustics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in December 1991, where he worked as an associate researcher, researcher, assistant director, deputy director, executive deputy director and director.
Tian Jing was appointed director of the High Technology Research and Development Bureau of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in January 2008; appointed director of the Institute of Information Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011, and was also deputy director of the State Secrets Bureau of the CPC in November of the same year; elected vice chairman of the International Council of Acoustics on June 5, 2013; and director of the State Secrets Bureau of the CPC from April 2015 to March 2021.
Li Zhaozong succeeded Tian Jing, but there is very little public information about him on the Internet, except that Li Zhaozong was the deputy director of the First Bureau of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee (Bureau of Confidential Affairs) and the director of the CPC State Cryptography Administration, and was a delegate to the 19th CPC National Congress.
Official public information indicates that the functions of the State Secrets Bureau of the CPC mainly include the review of classified information, the establishment and implementation of rules and regulations, supervision, investigation and handling of cases of breach of secrecy, and administrative punishment.
According to an official report on April 10, 2015, Tian Jing was replaced by Meng Xiangfeng when he took over as head of the State Secrets Bureau. Meng only succeeded Xia Yong in March 2013 and has been the State Secrets Director for only two years.
According to Baidu, the State Secrets Bureau of the CPC is a set of people and two brands, nominally a state bureau under the State Council, but the State Council does not care, in fact, under the direct management of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee.
The Vice Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and Minister of the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee, who fell on Dec. 22, 2014, was the executive vice director and director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee for a decade. He has cultivated a large number of cronies in the central system while also mastering a large number of top secrets in Zhongnanhai.
The official notification of the charges against Ling Plan includes accepting huge bribes, obtaining a large number of “core secrets of the party and state” and adultery with several women. What core secrets did you get? Officials will not say.
A September 1, 2016 report in the Beijing Daily quoted the verdict as stating that Ling Plan was guilty of illegally obtaining state secrets. During his tenure as head of the Communist Party’s Central United Front Work Department and vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Ling Plan illegally obtained a large number of state secrets through Huo Ke, then head of the Secretary Bureau of the Central Office, and other individuals. In the courtroom where the trial of Ling Plan took place, the prosecutors presented evidence such as the testimony of witnesses Huo Ke and others. Huo Ke himself also committed the illegal act of leaking secrets.
The overseas media had disclosed that the authorities investigated and found that the confidential documents of the Central Office that were purposefully stolen before the fall of Ling Plan, some of which are believed to have been taken to the United States by his brother, Ling Cheng, to become a bargaining chip to blackmail Zhongnanhai. The seriousness of the foreign media’s order to complete the departure far exceeds that of Wang Lijun’s defection from the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in early 2012. But the rumors have since died down.
After the 18th Communist Party Congress, Xi Jinping‘s hardcore Li Zhanshu, during his tenure as director of the Central Office, carried out a major purge of cronies of Ling Plan. In 2013, Meng Xiangfeng suddenly replaced Xia Yong, who had moved to become deputy director of the State Council’s Legal Affairs Office, as director of the State Secrets Bureau, and thereafter also served as director of the Central Secrets Committee Office and director of the Central Office’s Research Office. By last year’s Fifth Plenary Session, Meng Xiangfeng was explicitly made executive deputy director of the Central Office.
Meng Xiangfeng’s predecessor, Xia Yong, was deputy director of the Research Office of the Central Office in 2005 and director of the Office of the Central Secrecy Commission and director of secrecy in 2006. At that time, it was the director of the Central Secrecy Commission, which was headed by Ling Plan. Xia Yong left the Central Office system in 2013 to become deputy director of the Legal Affairs Office of the Communist Party’s State Council.
A number of international media outlets cited in May and June 2016 that Xia Yong was being investigated by the Commission for Discipline Inspection for his involvement in the Ling Plan case.
The official website of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) informed in August 2016 that Xia Yong, the former deputy director of the Legal Affairs Office of the CPC State Council, was posthumously disqualified as a member of the CPPCC by the 47th meeting of the 12th CPPCC National Committee Chairman due to serious disciplinary violations.
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