As early as the start of President Xi Jinping’s second term in 2018, the Chinese leadership declared an “overwhelming victory” in its battle against corruption.
In the first five years of the campaign, some of the biggest names in the ruling Communist Party’s elite body, the Politburo, had been brought down, including Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest echelon in China’s political hierarchy.
Rather than signalling an end, the declaration now appears to have been a beginning.
Last year, graft fighters at various levels punished more than 983,000 people, according to numbers released in January.
In the same year, the Communist Party’s top graft-fighters also detained 65 high-ranking officials.
All of these sacked officials will be absent from the annual “two sessions”, which starts on Wednesday.
While most of the focus of this week’s gathering will be on the economy, the war on corruption is at the heart of Xi’s approach to government.
According to researchers and analysts, the anti-corruption drive is far from a temporary campaign – it is becoming the foundation on which the party aims to anchor its long-term hold on power and the way it whips its officials so they follow Beijing’s policy line.
Last year was something of a record.
The 65 “tigers”, or senior officials, detained by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), were a high for any year since the start of the anti-corruption campaign.
These tigers typically held deputy ministerial rank or higher. Some occupied slightly lower positions but held key posts in vital departments.
The CCDI is China’s supreme disciplinary and anti-corruption body and it started this year in a similar vein – by the end of January 2026, it said inquiries were under way into the activities of another 10 senior officials.
And these do not include a number of senior generals under investigation by a separate anti-corruption agency within the Chinese military.
Among them is Zhang Youxia, a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and China’s most senior military officer.
The defence ministry announced late last month that Zhang and fellow CMC vice-chairman Liu Zhenli were the targets of disciplinary investigations.
Gone, too, is He Weidong, who used to be China’s second-ranked uniformed officer. Like Zhang, He was a member of the Politburo, the party’s innermost circle.
The cull has reduced the Politburo to just 22 members, with speculation about the fate of another – Ma Xingrui, the former party chief of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region who has been conspicuously absent from several high-level meetings.
Numbers are also down on the party’s Central Committee, the body that selects the Politburo. According to a South China Morning Post tally, among the 200-plus members of the committee who took office at the 20th party congress in 2022, 13 have already been expelled from the party for “violations of discipline and law”, while a further 11 are facing investigations.
With the 21st congress not due until 2027, the number of departures already exceeds the total from Xi’s first term from 2012 to 2017.
Over the past 14 years, Xi has repeatedly emphasised that his anti-corruption campaign has no endpoint, warning that no official should harbour any illusions of impunity.
According to excerpts from a speech published in January, Xi told officials at a crucial political meeting in October that corrupt elements would find nowhere to hide.
“[We must] maintain a high-pressure stance against corruption at all times, investigate and punish corruption cases according to the law and regulations, and severely punish corrupt officials,” Xi was quoted as saying by Qiushi, the party’s official publication.
“[We must] not stop for a moment or yield an inch, [we must] not give corrupt officials any hiding place, and no one should harbour any illusions or wishful thinking,” he told the Central Committee.
For Xi, corruption is the “greatest threat” facing the party.
He maintains that strong efforts in this area can “ensure the red country never changes its colour”, referring to the party’s long-term governance of China.
The party leadership has repeatedly said that corruption is a threat to the “advanced nature” and “purity“ of the world’s largest political party, which seized power through a long revolution and civil war and now has more than 100 million members.
Only through anti-corruption efforts can the party healthily steer economic development, Beijing has said.
For many in China, the anti-corruption crackdown is now a normal part of life and not necessarily a reflection of the party’s stability.
Experts noted that after more than a decade of such efforts, the public had gradually become accustomed to high-ranking officials being brought down.
“The investigations of many big cases signal more government commitment to anti-corruption [activities] and capacity from the view of many average Chinese people,” according to Zhu Jiangnan, an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s politics and public administration department.
She added that 14 years ago in the campaign’s infancy, when senior officials were declared corrupt, “the shock to many people might make the public doubt the government’s ethics and even governing capacity”.
“[But] after years of anti-corruption efforts, people are not so surprised any more when new and serious cases are reported,” Zhu said.
Qian Jingyuan, assistant professor in political science at Boston College, agreed, saying: “After 14 years, the anti-corruption campaign has been regularised and normalised in the eyes of the public, who now tend to see it as part of everyday life rather than as a new spectacle.
“Chinese citizens have become accustomed to this ‘new normal’ of the Chinese bureaucracy and are less likely to draw strong conclusions about the party’s strength or stability at this moment.”
Promotions will again be in the spotlight in 2027.
The party congress meeting at the end of that year will be the climax of a long reshuffle that started in 2026 and will determine appointees at all levels of the party.
Whether officials will go up or down will increasingly depend on their anti-corruption efforts, with more sophisticated metrics and stricter standards expected to be introduced to performance assessments.
Deng Yuwen, former deputy editor of the Study Times, the official publication of the Central Party School, the party’s top ideological training centre, suggested that along with age, anti-corruption efforts would be a main driver in evaluating officials’ promotions, indicating that younger and more honest cadres would get priority.
The question of “honesty” could also become more complex to include a commitment to Xi’s policies.
Some of the charges frequently levelled against corrupt officials involve their role as “two-faced men” practising “false loyalty”.
In one case, the now-disgraced Zhang Youxia published an article in party mouthpiece People’s Daily denouncing officials who speak one way publicly yet act another behind closed doors. That was just two months before his downfall.
A more serious issue is that some officials under investigation showed little enthusiasm for implementing policy directives from the highest leadership.
In official announcements of downfalls, this can be cast as “violating the new concept for development” – a policy framework championed by Xi that prohibits officials from pursuing economic growth through debt or environmental degradation.
A recent example is Lan Tianli, former party secretary of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in southern China, who was investigated last year.
State news agency Xinhua said in December that Lan “violated the new concept for development and high-quality development requirements, implementing the party Central Committee’s major decisions and plans in a half-hearted manner and resorting to workarounds”.
Although Lan’s violations were not spelled out, the CCDI has said that the failure to address the new concept for development would bring “losses” to the party and people, and would eventually lead to corruption.
Zhu from HKU said China often carried out its anti-corruption campaigns in coordination with other major policy goals.
“What kind of misconduct is combated more or deterred more sometimes needs to align with the main policy priorities,” Zhu said.
For example, now boosting the economy is one of Beijing’s priorities so anti-corruption agencies can use announcements about officials who fail to do this as a warning to others, according to Zhu.
Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Research Centre of Public Policy at Peking University, who specialises in anti-corruption studies, told China News Service on February 1 that investigating senior officials in the lead-up to the congress was meant to “dispel any wait-and-see or complacent attitudes some may harbour”.
At the same time, “anti-corruption performance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for promotion in contemporary Chinese bureaucracy”, Qian at Boston College said.
“Anti-corruption efforts reduce rent-seeking and embezzlement. They also unintentionally disincentivise local officials from pursuing economic growth and investment, as officials become increasingly uncertain about which behaviour might cross the red line,” Qian said, adding that the definition of “corruption” had become broader and more ambiguous.
“[Beijing] needs to strike a balance between disciplining its cadre force on the one hand, and properly incentivising and motivating their performance on the other.”
The increasing use of “new concept for development” in recent announcements “shows that the central leadership has increasingly linked anti-corruption efforts with proper policy enforcement”, Qian said.
“The anti-corruption campaign has been used as a tool to enforce the central policy agenda and ensure that subordinate officials properly carry out policies and directives from Beijing,” he said.
In addition, a broader range of sectors and younger officials will come under scrutiny, with “new and hidden forms of corruption” to be targeted.
At last month’s annual plenary session of the CCDI, anti-corruption investigators vowed to tackle graft in “key sectors including finance, state-owned enterprises, energy, education, professional associations, development zones and public tendering”.
It also pledged that anti-corruption authorities would “intensify efforts to investigate cross-border corruption cases” and cooperate with the top legislature in formulating a law against cross-border corruption.
Officials who are still prepared to take bribes are resorting to more covert and sophisticated methods to cover their tracks, according to investigation announcements.
And investigators have been using new, more sophisticated methods to follow the illicit money.
A documentary broadcast during January’s CCDI plenary session showed anti-corruption personnel using technology to trace the ill-gotten virtual currency gains of Yao Qian, a former official responsible for digital currency at the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the central bank.
It also detailed how the agency worked with law enforcement bodies in “multiple countries and regions” to trace bribes taken by Li Yong, a former senior China National Offshore Oil Corporation executive.
Anti-corruption authorities in the eastern province of Zhejiang also used big data and artificial intelligence to uncover corruption in municipal engineering project tendering processes.
A political scientist based on the mainland who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, expressed concern that the campaigns had affected the next generation of leaders.
“Judging by the previous term, the vigorous anti-corruption drive has led to a break in the succession pipeline for certain specialised fields, particularly in diplomacy and the military,” the researcher said.
“At present, there is absolutely no sign of the anti-corruption campaign easing up; this is a fairly clear trend,” the political scientist said, adding that “Xi intends to make anti-corruption his greatest political legacy.”
Deng also said the president was looking to the future.
By stressing that the campaign had no endpoint, he said, Xi was “signifying his desire for future leaders to maintain it as a policy priority”. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
