In his crackdown on corruption, Xi Jinping, China’s president, promised to take down lofty officials as well as lowly bureaucrats, “tigers” as well as “flies”. In detaining Rui Chenggang, the flashy, self-confident star anchor of state-owned CCTV, however, the Chinese authorities have gone for a strutting peacock.

Mr Rui was apprehended last week shortly before he was due to appear on his show, Economic News, whose 10m viewers matched his personal army of followers on the Twitter-like Weibo. In a slightly surreal echo of the 2010 Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo, when an empty chair was placed on stage to draw attention to Liu Xiaobo’s enforced absence, Mr Rui’s seat and microphone were left conspicuously on the television set.

On the face of it Mr Rui is an unlikely victim. Few people so embody the patriotic swagger of a new, seemingly confident China as the 36-year-old television personality. It was he who organised a successful online campaign to dislodge Starbucks from the Forbidden City because its “unrefined food culture” was an affront to Chinese tradition. It was he who, in a question to Barack Obama, the US president, claimed to speak for “all of Asia”. And it was he who mocked former US ambassador Gary Locke for flying economy class, asking him whether it was because the US owed China so much money.