Li Jinhua
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Li Jinhua (Simplified: 李金华; Traditional: 李金華; Pinyin: Lǐ Jīnhuá; July 1943-) is a high official of the People's Republic of China.
[edit] Biography
Li Jinhua was born in Rudong, Jiangsu, a coastal township of 60,000 in Jiangsu province, 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Shanghai, in 1943, when most of China was under Japanese occupation and much of the rest was controlled by the Nationalist Party government of Chiang Kai-shek.
The son of an impoverished pastry cook, Li says his fortunes changed when Mao Zedong's Communist Party came to power in 1949, enabling him to finish his schooling with government support.
In 1963, Li won a place at Beijing's elite Central Institute of Finance and Economics, later renamed the Central University of Finance and Economics. Among his contemporaries were Jin Renqing, China's current finance minister, and Dai Xianglong, former People's Bank of China governor and now mayor of Tianjin, China's fourth- largest city.
Top Student
Even amid such company, Li stood out, says Wang Peizhen, 89, who taught finance at the time and still gives tutorials at the university.
``It wasn't easy to get into this institute, she says. ``It picked 100 students from among tens of thousands. And then, every year, the faculty would pick seven or eight of the most-outstanding students in the graduate class to stay behind as teaching staff. Li was one of those.
Wang recalls him turning up at the start of school in a gray cotton jacket, which he wore every day. ``He was among the most down-to-earth students I had that year, she says. ``He had no political backing -- none at all. He gained what he did purely through hard work.
Wang says that in 1966, as the Cultural Revolution loomed, some students began to turn on her and other teachers. Li, who had joined the party in 1965, never took part, she says.
The Cultural Revolution prevented Li from taking up the teaching post in Beijing, Wang says. After graduating in the fall of 1966 with the highest grade of ``excellent (the others were ``good, ``fair and ``fail), Li was dispatched to the mountainous Shaanxi province, 1,000 kilometers away, to teach at the Northwest Institute of Finance and Economics.
First Job
In 1971, with the Cultural Revolution still raging, he became an accountant at aircraft factory number 572 in Shaanxi, where he worked for the next 14 years, rising to become the factory's director. In 1978, two years after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping came to power in China.
Deng began introducing a free-market economy, helping spark China's current economic boom. In 1983, Deng also reintroduced the government audits that Mao had allowed to lapse. Auditing is a Chinese tradition going back 3,000 years to the Western Zhou dynasty.
In 1985, Li became deputy auditor general -- a job he says he was given because of his finance training. At the time, he says, he knew little about government auditing. ``Now I know this profession much better, he says.
So much so that in 1998, Premier Zhu Rongji appointed Li head of the National Audit Office. Since then, Li has been raising its public profile. That year, it held a rare press conference. In 1999, Li published parts of his report to the standing committee of the National People's Congress, China's parliament.
Iron Mask Slips
In 2004, in a China Central Television poll, viewers voted him the country's economic personality of the year, beating People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan and Yang Yuanqing, then CEO of Lenovo Group Ltd., the technology company that had just acquired the personal computer business of International Business Machines Corp.
During the live presentation, Li's iron mask slipped. He wept as he told viewers he didn't deserve the award because he could have achieved nothing without his 80,000-strong team spread across China.
``The television channel showed a film of how difficult some of the auditors' working conditions were, Li recalls. ``There was one whose mother was dying at home, but the auditor was still working in the field. I was very much moved by that.
Li, who keeps a miniature, red hammer-and-sickle party flag on his file-stacked desk and who does calligraphy in his spare time, says he's immune to political pressure. ``I am a person who always practices in accord with the law and sticks to principles, says Li, whose office in Beijing's Xicheng district is half an hour's drive from Zhongnanhai, the walled compound adjacent to the Forbidden City where China's political leaders live. ``No one can tell me what to do, Li says.
Confronting Ministries
Among his targets are other ministries. Since 1999, Li has exposed officials of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's powerful planning ministry, for diverting funds to buy 9.6 million yuan worth of commercial housing. He's also uncovered evidence that the sports ministry was doing the same thing with funds intended for the Olympics, according to Xinhua.
The roads authority, Xinhua says, spent $205 million on bonuses, conferences and other indulgences when the money should have gone to farmers for land requisition. Spokesmen for the sports ministry and the Ministry of Communications, which oversees roads, declined to comment. The planning commission didn't return phone calls seeking comment.
Li's January report said he and his auditors had uncovered 5.4 billion yuan of state budget funds misused by 48 central government departments and their affiliates in 2006. He added that his team had audited 34,000 government and party officials and handed over 116 suspects to judicial departments.
He became the Auditor General of the National Audit Office of China in 1998, and was appointed to his second term in 2003. He was elected as the Person of the Year by Southern Weekend in 2004 for his leading role in the audit storm.
