City profile

Wu Xiaohui Rumours had been circulating for months that China’s anti-corruption brigade had the ambitious founder of the giant insurer Anbang in their sights, said The Economist. Then last week came news of Wu Xiaohui’s detention – and it has shaken the business community. Although many corporate bosses have been detained in recent years, Wu ranks as the most highprofile tycoon to be caught up in the country’s anticorruption sweep. “Despite his brash dealmaking, he was once thought untouchable,” because he is married to a granddaughter of the former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping, and had numerous connections with other Communist Party “princelings”. “Wu’s rise was almost as vertiginous as his apparent fall,” said the FT. Having made a fortune selling financial products in China, he shot to prominence internationally in 2014, when he bought New York’s trophy Waldorf Astoria hotel for $1.95bn. Since then, Anbang has attempted some $38bn in acquisitions globally – including an abandoned negotiation to take a $400m stake in a Manhattan property firm controlled by the family of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Wu’s detention may be part of a wider probe into China’s murky, highrolling insurance industry. But it also underlines President Xi Jinping’s growing self-assurance, says The Economist. “That Xi is ready to go after such a heavyweight, well-connected tycoon, ahead of important Communist Party meetings this autumn, underlines his confidence that nothing too destabilising will result.”