How British managers and Chinese communists are destroyed by the perks they take for granted

On the face of it, Lu Wei, the former director of China’s Cyberspace Administration, and Professor Max Lu, vice chancellor of the University of Surrey, have little in common. Mr Lu was the world’s most powerful censor. He maintained the great firewall of China and did all he could to stop 730 million Internet users reading or seeing anything the Communist Party might not approve of.

Professor Lu, by contrast, is an authority on chemical engineering and nanotechnology. When Surrey appointed him a delighted spokesman  exclaimed he was one of ‘only 150 double highly cited academics in the world, with over 500 peer-reviewed articles published in top journals, attracting more than 31,000 citations’. By all accounts, Professor Lu is a brilliant man, as dedicated to opening the world to inquiring minds as Mr Lu is to closing it.

The Chinese Communist party has now charged its former enforcer with taking advantage of his position to receive ‘a huge amount of property’, and of shamelessly trading ‘sex for power’.