politics - Personal anecdotes about Huang Qifan

Most meetings with Chinese official did not leave a big impression, but I do have to make an exception for Huang Qifan, the former director of the Economic Commission in Shanghai, at least that was his title when I first met him, shortly after I started to work in Shanghai.
Huang Qifan is likely to be the new chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission(CSRC), after a stint as vice-mayor in Chongqing.
At that meeting about nine years ago the news just broke that Huang had also become a vice-party secretary in Shanghai. A stern German colleague from Beijing asked him what his opinion was about CPC-chairman Jiang Zemin's stress on spiritual civilization and urge for a crackdown on sleazy karaoke bars and other spiritual evils.
Huang looked left at right at his aides and said that Shanghai had actually not enough of those places and people who visited Shanghai needed actually more, because they could not find enough entertainment. Huang Qifan was a former aid of then prime minister Zhu Rongji and obvious in a position to express his own mind.
His meetings were since then a must for me, and he very seldom disappointed in his approach. He broke up the monopoly of Shanghai Telecom, the subsidiary of the old China Telecom and it is partly thanks to him I can write these messages online.
The last time I saw him was around 1999 when I wrote an feature for the Chinese edition of the Fortune magazine on CEIBS, the China Europe Business School. For a week I walked around at the business school and during one EMBA-class I saw him, Huang Qifan, in his fifties, as one of the students at China's leading business school. That was when I realized that the brave people who change China are those smart officials, who never stop learning.