Luo Xi

Luo Xi, born in December 1960, has many years of experience in banking and insurance. After graduating in money and banking from the Graduate School of the People’s Bank of China in 1987, he worked for many years at the Agricultural Bank of China, and in 2009 moved from vice president of ABC to vice president of ICBC. In 2013 he moved into insurance, taking the helm of China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation as general manager; in 2016 he moved to China Resources (Holdings) Co., Ltd. as vice chairman and general manager; and from November 2018 he served as chairman of China Taiping Insurance Group.

According to reports, after Wang Bin moved to become chairman of China Life in September 2018, Luo Xi, who came from China Resources Group, took over China Taiping, and the “boutique strategy” that had previously appeared in Taiping’s annual reports subsequently disappeared. According to Caixin, after Luo Xi left, Taiping’s work was overseen by vice chairman and general manager Wang Sidong.

In September 2020, Luo Xi went to PICC Group, and in December of the same year became chairman of the group, succeeding Miao Jianmin. On his eighth day in the new post, September 15, 2020, PICC’s official WeChat account was renamed from “PICC People’s Insurance Company of China” to “People’s Insurance”; in November 2020, PICC established its “Excellent Insurance Strategy”, emphasising planning the group within the overall context of the national economy and society and making the nation’s needs its primary task. In June 2021, PICC Group adopted a new logo, introducing a seal-style emblem combining the characters for “China” and “insurance”, implementing the corporate culture upgrade and transformation that Luo Xi had emphasised.

At a results briefing in March 2021, Luo Xi set out his strategic goals: by 2025, to rank among the top five comparable insurers worldwide by operating revenue, with property and casualty insurance reaching first place globally on its main indicators; and by 2035, to rank among the top three by operating revenue, with property and casualty insurance first in global competition on all indicators. He laid out the implementation path in five areas: aligning annual budgets with strategic planning; designing 42 strategic projects to address capability and efficiency problems on the supply side of insurance; promoting technology empowerment; improving corporate governance; and cultural transformation. He said PICC should “return to centre stage”, and admitted frankly that although PICC had listed three times, its internal governance had not necessarily become modern as a result; he believed that the earlier cases of fake policies in Qiu County, the Jiufu credit guarantee insurance business and the Kingold fake gold all showed the need to rebuild a modern corporate governance structure.

On reform, PICC launched a technology reform in January 2021; its core subsidiary PICC Property and Casualty at the same time introduced a reform plan called the “Sanwan Reorganisation”. In the first half of 2022, PICC Group’s net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent rose 5.7% year on year and premium income rose 11.2% year on year; group president Wang Tingke said that this reflected the industry-wide recovery after the comprehensive reform of property insurance and PICC’s clear comparative advantages, but that the fundamental reason was the implementation of the Excellent Insurance Strategy. In July 2022, Zhang Jinhai was promoted from general manager of PICC Group’s technology operations department and president of PICC Technology to member of the group’s Party committee, and was proposed as vice president.

After taking office, Luo Xi immediately pushed for younger cadres, with several senior executives in the system stepping back to secondary roles, and implemented a policy requiring recusal of immediate family members as well as a “ban on alcohol”, among other measures; his plan to change working hours from nine-to-five to 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. was voted down at a subsidiary’s workers’ congress. According to Caixin, his distinctive and forceful working style polarised opinion inside and outside the company; one PICC insider described the measures of former chairman Miao Jianmin as “prescribing traditional Chinese medicine”, while Luo Xi’s were tantamount to “administering strong medicine”; one executive who had left PICC Group described his conduct as “reckless nonsense”.

On January 29, 2023, PICC Life, a subsidiary of PICC Group, issued a notice requiring all cadres and employees to study, become familiar with and memorise a collection of “golden quotes” delivered by Luo Xi at the launch meeting for the first-quarter peak sales season. According to people close to PICC speaking to Caixin, the notice was prompted by Luo Xi asking a local life insurance head about his business ideas during a local inspection tour and not receiving a satisfactory answer. The content spread through self-media on February 4 and was criticised by CCTV as a typical example of the unhealthy trend of “flattering” leaders at central state-owned enterprises, and PICC Life annulled the notice overnight. On the afternoon of February 17, 2023, PICC Group held an enlarged meeting of its Party committee, at which, on the delegation of the leadership of the Central Organization Department, the responsible official of the relevant cadre bureau of the Central Organization Department announced the central decision to remove Luo Xi from his post as secretary of the group’s Party committee. Caixin reported that several industry insiders, including people at PICC, believed that the trigger for this personnel change was the above-mentioned “golden quotes controversy”.