Lou Jiwei, China’s former finance minister and the best-known protégé of former Chinese prime minister Zhu Rongji, was rumored on July 31 to have come under investigation. Four days later, word went out that Lou will speak at a closed-door seminar in Beijing on Aug. 8, an arrangement exiled analysts read as the authorities’ answer to the rumor.
Lou, 75, is best known outside China for publicly criticizing Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” industrial policy. Analysts say Xi’s purge of officials tied to retired Party elders is continuing as he seeks to extend his rule at the CCP’s 21st National Congress, raising questions about whether the campaign could reach Zhu Rongji himself and whether Lou will ultimately emerge unscathed.
A Caixin editor announces Lou will speak behind closed doors on Aug. 8
On Aug. 4, Zhu Changzheng, deputy editor-in-chief and macro editor at Caixin, wrote on Weibo that a closed-door seminar on “revitalizing existing state-owned assets” would be held on Aug. 8 and that former finance minister Lou Jiwei would speak.
Cai Shenkun, a U.S.-based independent commentator, wrote on X the same day that “Zhu Rongji’s favored general, former finance minister Lou Jiwei, is coming out to refute the rumors.” Citing what he described as the latest information, Cai said Lou would attend a closed-door financial research seminar in Beijing’s Xicheng district on Aug. 8 and give a keynote address on revitalizing existing state-owned assets. Cai cautioned, however, that Lou’s planned appearance did not necessarily mean he had “landed safely.”
Cai said the purge of officials tied to previous Party leaders has expanded from the circles of Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Wang Qishan, Wen Jiabao, and Li Ruihuan to include associates of Zhu Rongji. He argued that senior officials with close ties to influential retired leaders could become targets ahead of Xi Jinping’s expected bid to extend his rule at the 21st Party Congress. The phrase “leftover elders and juniors of the previous dynasty” is a disparaging reference to officials associated with earlier administrations, while “centrally managed cadres” refers to senior officials whose appointments are controlled by the CCP’s central leadership.
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“Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption is a joke, because Xi Jinping’s family is itself a corrupt family,” one X user wrote. “Even if Xi sold off his shares years ago, it does not change the fact that his is a corrupt family.”
Two of Lou’s former secretaries fell before the rumor reached him
On July 31, Australia-based commentator Jiang Wangzheng claimed on X that former finance minister Lou Jiwei was under investigation.
On the same day, Cai Shenkun posted an account of Lou’s career. Cai described the 75-year-old former finance minister as a favored protégé of Zhu Rongji and claimed that Lou had long been suppressed by the political network associated with former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, leaving him marginalized within the Party-state system. According to Cai, Lou’s fortunes improved after the CCP’s 18th National Congress in 2012, when Zhu strongly recommended him for the post of finance minister.
On Zhu’s strong recommendation, Lou became finance minister while Li Keqiang served as prime minister. In November 2016, at 66, he moved to the chairmanship of the council governing the national social security fund, the state’s pension reserve. In 2019, at 69, he became a standing committee member of the Party’s political advisory body and director of its foreign affairs committee, posts he held until formally retiring at 73 in March 2023.
With rumors about Zhu Rongji multiplying in recent years, Cai wrote, Zhu’s former subordinates have become a running topic of speculation. One after another, the secretaries of Li Ruihuan, the advisory body’s former chairman, then of former prime minister Wen Jiabao, then of Wang Qishan had been arrested, and the turn had finally come to Zhu’s protégé. For his renewal at the 21st Congress, Cai added, Xi will keep purging the old guard to clear away every hidden danger.
Four days after the reports of trouble, the public rebuttal arrived, and whether Lou’s next step brings fortune or calamity cannot yet be known. But the duck knows first when the spring river warms, as the Song poet Su Shi’s line has it, and two of Lou’s onetime secretaries have already fallen. Zheng Jianxin worked under Lou in Guizhou province and at the finance ministry, then transferred to Hunan, where he rose to mayor of Changsha.
Removed from that post in May 2023 after a building collapse that killed 53 people, he turned himself in to investigators in June 2025 and was expelled from the Party and from public office in April 2026. Zhang Hong’an, who served as Lou’s secretary and later as supervisory board chairman of China Jianyin Investment, a state financial holding company, was placed under investigation in December 2020.
Lou told reporters ‘Made in China 2025’ should never have been proposed
In 2016 Lou took the chairmanship of the social security fund council, and in April 2019 he left it abruptly, well before his term’s natural end. Media reports at the time said he may have lost the post early for angering Xi, who had unveiled “Made in China 2025,” the industrial master plan for dominating high-tech manufacturing, in 2015.
Lou publicly criticized the “Made in China 2025” strategy during China’s annual legislative meetings in March 2019. According to the South China Morning Post, he said the policy “should not have been proposed” and that he had opposed it from the beginning. Lou argued that the initiative had largely failed to deliver on its promises and said one of its main consequences had been wasting taxpayers’ money.
The government, Lou said bluntly, had no need to set targets for 2025 at all, because industrial trends are hard to predict and government should not draw up such plans against a background full of unknowns.
In September 2020, at a seminar of the Economists 50 Forum, a club of China’s most senior economists, Lou aimed an oblique criticism at Xi’s economic program as it moved from supply-side reform to the “dual circulation” framework stressing domestic demand.
“It especially needs saying that if this is an objective law, then a government deliberately optimizing the layout of industrial chains according to dual circulation is something that cannot be done, and a race to use public funds to seize the new technological high ground is something that cannot be done well,” he said. “The losses outweigh the gains, and it will invite misunderstanding at home and abroad.”
For Xi, remarks this blunt and critical were hard to accept. In March 2023, Lou gave up his advisory posts and retired.
Cai Shenkun says the purge of the elders’ confidants has reached Zhu Rongji
Cai Shenkun said in a YouTube commentary that Lou Jiwei stands out for having independent views on economic policy, particularly macroeconomics, and is not the kind of “empty-headed bureaucrat” sometimes derided in Chinese political discourse. Cai argued that if the authorities were to move against Lou, people both inside and outside the CCP would inevitably connect the case to former premier Zhu Rongji, because Lou has long been regarded as one of Zhu’s most prominent protégés.
As for whether the Aug. 8 appearance shows Lou has landed safely, Cai argued that if Lou had truly passed the test, the meeting he attends would not be behind closed doors. By rank, Lou is a retired minister-level official entitled to vacation at Beidaihe, the seaside resort where the Party’s elite gather each summer, and he did not go.
When Xi came to power, Cai said, the first targets of his rolling purges of the old guard were officials promoted by the former Party chiefs Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, along with those sitting in important posts. Lou differed somewhat from those earlier targets, Cai noted, having been held down while Jiang ruled and having played no major role in the years of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.
Only after the 18th Congress, with Jiang’s influence fading, did Lou win Hu Jintao’s firm backing, and with good personal relations with Wang Qishan and central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan besides, he served his term as finance minister. Since the Party’s 19th Congress in 2017, Cai went on, Xi’s purge of the confidants around the Party’s elders has never stopped. After the 20th Congress it worked through Li Ruihuan’s men, then Wen Jiabao’s, then Wang Qishan’s, and has now extended to Zhu Rongji’s side.
Any serving or retired senior official who intersects with an influential Party elder, he said, may become an easy target in the 21st Congress period. Xi must renew his rule, and to do that he must clear away the elders’ influence and forestall their criticism, or in Party language their “improper discussion” of the center. His instrument, Cai said, is to purge the people beside them, “striking the mountain to shake the tiger,” as the idiom has it, a warning delivered by proxy.
The discipline commission might have questioned Lou
Rumors that Lou would be investigated, Cai said, date from 2025. Early this year, he recounted, an acquaintance of his returned to China from the United States with a dinner arranged with Lou, and on the day of the dinner no word came. Asking around, the acquaintance learned that Lou had been called away for “questioning” by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Since the announced arrest of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli on January 24, Cai said, Lou should have been questioned by the commission at least twice.
Whether the questioning connects to the two generals’ cases is not clear, Cai noted. And with the Zhang case implicating Wang Qishan and the people around him, whether Zhu Rongji will be touched remains to be watched.
After the Zhang case broke, Zhou Liang, a deputy director of the National Financial Regulatory Administration who served Wang as personal secretary for two decades, was placed under investigation on March 24, and Li Xiaohong, the former director of the office of the Party’s central inspection work leading group, fell on June 2, as Vision Times has reported. Cai called the two men the last of Wang Qishan’s longest-serving followers, and claimed that Xi had once given Wang personal assurances about both men, yet in the end spared neither. “This shows the matter is not one of corruption,” Cai said. “It is one of political alignment.”
The authenticity of these revelations cannot currently be verified.
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