The Chinese government’s arrest, on charges of spying and stealing state secrets, of four China-based executives of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Group made worldwide headlines in July. At press time they were still in prison. But they are far from the only executives who have felt the long arm of Chinese law in recent months. Huang Guangyu, founder of electronics retailer GOME Electrical Appliances Holdings Ltd. and once China’s richest man, has not been seen since last November, when he was detained on suspicion of stock fraud. In August, Shanghai infrastructure tycoon Liu Genshan, another of China’s richest men, was sentenced to eight years for embezzling millions from a highway project. That same month, the former chairman of the group that runs Beijing’s international airport was executed for embezzling around $15 million from the company.

Anticorruption campaigns have been a feature of Chinese political life dating back to dynastic times, but those campaigns were usually focused only on government officials. Wu Wei, a litigation partner at Beijing firm King & Wood, credits the shift largely to increased sophistication among law enforcement officials, as well as growing awareness at the top levels of government that widespread corruption in business endangers the nation’s long-term development.

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