Sun Zhengcai

Sun Zhengcai (born September 25, 1963) is a former Chinese politician and senior regional official.

Sun was born to a family of farmers in a village located near the city of Rongcheng, Shandong province in September 1963.

In 1980, Sun was admitted to the Laiyang Agricultural College (now Qingdao Agricultural University).

After obtaining a bachelor's degree, he pursued post-graduate work at the Beijing Agriculture and Forestry Institute and the China Agricultural University, where he obtained master's degrees in agronomy.

After completing his academic work, he remained at the institute to conduct further research and eventually obtained positions as an administrator, rising to become executive vice president of the institute, in charge of its day-to-day work.

Sun joined the Chinese Communist Party in July 1988.

Sun was the youngest member of the 18th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, and the fourth sitting Politburo member to be expelled from the party since 1990.

Prior to his fall from grace, Sun was once considered to be a leading candidate for a top leadership position in the "6th Generation of Chinese leadership".

Since the 1990s, regional leadership tenures were seen as important stepping stones to eventual national leadership.

It is not clear if Sun had any strong backing from former political heavyweights prior to his ascendancy to the Politburo; more likely, he was a consensus candidate whose loyalties crossed factional lines.

It has been suggested that Jia Qinglin or Wen Jiabao may have served as Sun's advocate for promotion; the former because Sun worked for Beijing for much of his early political career, where Jia Qinglin was party secretary, and the latter because Wen and Sun both share a modest upbringing and common concerns for China's rural population.

In Chongqing, Sun advocated for a strategy he termed "Five Great Capability Areas" (五大功能区), splitting Chongqing into five spheres from which to distribute resources.

In 1997, he was named governor and Deputy Communist Party Secretary of Shunyi County in rural Beijing.

Shunyi was then converted from a county to an urban district; Sun continued to serve as district governor.

In February 2002, he became the Party Secretary of the Shunyi District.

Shortly thereafter, in May 2002, Sun unexpectedly defeated then municipal propaganda department head Jiang Xiaoyu in a municipal party committee election to earn a seat on the municipal Party Standing Committee, ascending to sub-provincial ranks at the mere age of 39.

He was elevated to become secretary-general of the Beijing party organization from 2002 to 2006, in December 2006, he was appointed as Minister of Agriculture as nominated by Premier Wen Jiabao.

At age 43, Sun was one of the youngest State Council ministers at the time.

In November 2009, Sun was named party secretary of Jilin province, in northeast China.

From 2012 to 2017, Sun served as the Communist Party Secretary of Chongqing, an interior municipality, and a member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.

Prior to that, he served as the Party Secretary of Jilin province, and Minister of Agriculture of China.

In November 2012, after the 18th CCP National Congress, he was appointed a member of the Politburo and replaced Zhang Dejiang as party chief of Chongqing.

The post in Chongqing had emerged as one of the most important regional offices in China, and Sun's assuming the reins in the interior municipality signaled that he was likely destined for even higher office.

It also demonstrated the trust that the central leadership placed in Sun, as Chongqing had only a month earlier weathered a political storm with the attempted defection of police chief Wang Lijun and the ouster of party chief Bo Xilai.

In January 2016, Xi Jinping paid a visit to Chongqing during which he lauded the city's achievements.

At the 2016 National People's Congress, Xi shook hands enthusiastically with Sun.

The events led to speculation in the media that Sun had earned Xi's endorsement to progress further.

Sun was abruptly removed from office in July 2017 and put under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

The CCDI accused him of political and criminal wrongdoing, and he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party.

In February 2017, Sun's fate seemed to take a fatal turn.

Inspection teams under the auspices of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection released a report announcing that Chongqing had not done enough to excise its political scene from the influence of Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun, and that "party leadership had weakened".

This was seen as an oblique criticism of Sun's own management of the party organization.

It was the first blot on Sun in an otherwise steady term in Chongqing.

In May, Sun took the opportunity at the municipal party congress to laud Xi as the party's leadership core, and declare his intentions to resolutely stamp out the influence of Bo Xilai and Wang Lijun.

In June 2017, Chongqing police chief He Ting was removed from office.

He Ting and Sun were from the same area of Shandong province.

On July 15, 2017, party authorities announced that Sun was to be replaced in his post as party secretary of Chongqing by Chen Min'er, who was propaganda chief in Zhejiang when Xi Jinping was provincial party secretary there.

The meeting to announce the event had been called abruptly, and Sun himself was not present at the handover ceremony; there was no mention of his record in Chongqing, either, as was customary for major transition meetings.

Curiously, footage of Sun also appeared to be deliberately cut from Xinwen Lianbo coverage of the National Finance Work Conference - a meeting attended by all Politburo members.

He was convicted of bribery and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018.