BEIJING: Senior diplomat Sun Weidong was suddenly dismissed from his post as vice foreign minister in China.
China’s Ministry of Human Resources announced Sun Weidong’s dismissal in a brief statement on its website, saying the decision was made by China’s highest government authority. However, the statement did not say why or when the vice foreign minister was dismissed.
According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s website, Sun Weidong’s last public activities were meetings with the ambassadors of Brunei and Malaysia to China on March 13, two days before that, he had discussed bilateral cooperation with the Pakistani ambassador to China.
Last year, China investigated more than 1 million corruption cases and punished 938,000 people.
According to China’s annual report on corruption, the disciplinary action cases involved 69 provincial or ministerial-level officials, 4,155 bureau-level officers, 35,000 district-level officials, and 125,000 tehsil or local-level officials.
