Luo Gan - Biography

Biography

Luo Gan studied engineering at the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute. Luo joined the Communist Party of China in 1960.

Afterwards, he moved to East Germany and spent eight years as a student at Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg as well as working in steel plants. Upon returning to China, Luo continued to work in the steel industry and became party chief of the central Henan Province in the 1980s.

Luo has developed a close relationship with Li Peng and is considered his protégé. He was appointed as the Minister of Labor from April to December in 1988.

Luo was appointed a state councillor in 1993 (served until 2003), and became a member of the Politburo in 1998. Serving as the security chief, he implemented the "strike hard" anti-crime campaign, which blamed to have led to increased executions, and is said to have personally directed the suppression of illegal organisations and protests such as that at the Pubugou Dam protest in 2004. He was also instrumental in the Falun Gong crackdown.

As the oldest member of the Politburo Standing Committee, he retired after the CPC's 17th Party Congress in the fall of 2007.

Read more about this topic:  Luo Gan

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.
    André Maurois (1885–1967)

    In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)