The Upright Magistrates

One evening in the spring of 1995, a colleague and I were talking about the anti-corruption drive that was then jolting Beijing. The city's powerful Communist Party secretary, Chen Xitong, had just resigned and been replaced by the party's top anti-corruption investigator; the previous year, Beijing Vice Mayor Wang Baosen had committed suicide rather than face corruption charges. The scandal gripped the city and everyone wondered what would happen next.