As an alternate member of the CPC Central Committee, Qiu is the fourth provincial-level official in Yunnan to be placed under investigation since November 2012 when Xi Jinping took the Party's top office.

The previous three were Bai Enpei, former Party chief of the province, Shen Peiping, a deputy provincial governor and Zhang Tianxin, Party chief of the provincial capital Kunming.

Qiu, 58, started his career as an agricultural researcher at the Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1982 after graduating from Nanjing Agricultural University.

Following eight years in the academy, Qiu was named a deputy section chief in the Jiangsu provincial science committee, becoming a government official. In 1996, he was promoted to vice-mayor of Suqian, a small city in Jiangsu that turned into a demonstration of his ironhanded measures in improving officials' work style and developing urban infrastructure.

He became well known across the country in 2004 when Southern Weekly, a popular newspaper in China, published a cover story about the governance of Qiu, who was then Party chief of Suqian.

The ensuing media coverage on Qiu's relentless efforts in punishing slack officials and invigorating the local economy brought him a huge reputation as well as controversies that claimed he overused his power and sold out State-owned assets in the city.

However, such controversies did not stop him from a succession of promotions. In 2006, Qiu was appointed deputy governor of Jiangsu. Nearly two years later, he became Party chief of Kunming, where he continued to impose his heavy-handed policies on officials.

Despite Qiu leaving the city government and being named deputy Party chief in late 2011, some people accuse him of executing forcible demolition to make way for his development plan.