Corruption Troubleshooter

Yang Ping, a Communist Party of China (CPC) official, has made himself a household name in China as the country's first real-name official-blogger to launch an anti-corruption campaign online.

Yang, 47, Secretary of the CPC Zhuzhou Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection, in central China's Hunan Province, became a registered user of a local website in mid-May and asked netizens to report corrupt officials at his blog site. In the following two months, he released nine posts and answered 346 comments.

Though he was maligned by netizens at first, Yang was eventually accepted as using his genuine identity and is now known as a corruption troubleshooter.

According to Yang, because of anonymity, online complaints are harsh and usually point directly to corruption cases. Based on a petition on Yang's blog, the Party discipline watchdog of Zhuzhou recently investigated a local official who has been detained for alleged corruption.

Yang's pioneering efforts have ignited a growing call in China's Internet community for more officials to follow his example.

A Cop of Many Tongues

The 41-year-old Beijing Olympic torchbearer, Liu Wenli, is a multilingual marvel in China's capital city.

A policeman, Liu is able to speak 13 foreign languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Swede, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. "My English and French are okay, but for other languages, I can only hold simple conversations," said Liu.

Liu's immense interest in foreign languages was incidentally aroused during the 1995 World Conference on Women. Liu was assigned to patrol around the conference hall. A foreign lady asked for his assistance, but Liu couldn't understand her. "It was extremely embarrassing [for me]," said Liu.

Since then, Liu has devoted most of his time to language study. His radio is always tuned BBC and his notebooks are filled with new words. He even searches out foreign visitors on the streets to practice oral English. The efforts finally paid off when he was selected from 500 candidates to be a torchbearer at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Beijing is expected to receive more than 500,000 overseas guests during the Olympics in August, and Liu's workplace, the Beihai Police Station in Xicheng District, bordering the Forbidden City, will be in great need of his language skills.

Insurance Boss in Mega Salary Dispute

Ma Mingzhe, 53, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong- and Shanghai-listed Ping An Insurance Co., China's second largest life insurer, openly defended the company's salary structure as being legitimate and reasonable, and told the Beijing Times on July 18 that his contribution is worthy of a high salary.

Ma made the Forbes list again this year by topping the highest salaried bosses of listed Chinese companies based on a 66-million-yuan ($9.4 million) annual income in 2006, a 394-percent increase over the previous year. In comparison, Ping An's 2006 net profits stood at 17.48 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), a year-on-year increase of 126 percent.

The huge gap has nevertheless sparked wide criticism. Ma explained that the company paid him fairly by assessing his performance. "Over the past two decades, as Ping An's chief executive officer, I have successfully steered Ping An to rank in the Fortune 500 companies (462nd in 2008)," said Ma.

Joining Ping An in 1988, Ma has worked in the insurance industry for his entire career. Under his leadership, the company has risen from a regional insurer to a national brand name worth 691 billion yuan (about $100 billion) at the end of 2007. But as Ping An's A-share price plummets, its market value has shrunk by nearly three quarters from the peak in last October.