Anti-corruption purge of China’s Communist Party is a campaign without end

A meeting of China’s Communist Party last week saw an almost unprecedented number of expulsions from its senior ranks. There will be more.

When the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party met in Beijing last week, more than one in five of those appointed to the body four years ago were missing. Some were ill or otherwise indisposed, but many were absent because they have been disgraced after being caught up in Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.

The party confirmed the expulsion of 33 full or alternate members of the central committee since last year, including 16 senior generals. Although it did not provide details of their offences, most were targeted by the anti-corruption campaign that has seen almost 1,000 senior party figures disciplined or expelled since 2014.

The scale of the campaign is remarkable, with 8.1 million of the party’s 101 million members investigated over the past 14 years and 7.9 million disciplined. Last week, Xi told the meeting in Beijing that cleaning up the party and making it more focused and disciplined was a long-term strategic task that was essential for maintaining its governing position.

“The vast majority of party members are exemplary, yet there remain a number of problems and hidden dangers that threaten to undermine the party’s advanced nature, weaken its integrity and jeopardise its long-term governance. In particular, the problems of defects in thinking, organisation and conduct have yet to be solved root and branch, while some new problems continue to emerge,” he said.

Western commentators often view Xi’s anti-corruption campaign solely through the lens of his ambition to consolidate and retain his position as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. But it goes far beyond that, reaching back to a question Mao was asked in 1945 about how a communist government could avoid the historical cycle of rising to power, becoming complacent and corrupt and eventually collapsing.

Mao said the answer lay in the people’s oversight of government, which in the context of the Chinese communist system meant the party exercising that role on the people’s behalf. The party said last week that it had found a second way to avoid the cycle of rise and fall: its own self-reform.

The anti-corruption campaign is broadly popular, especially among non-party members who have in the past had to pay the price of corruption in bribes to officials and missed opportunities because of cronyism. But the endless process of internal reform with its constant inspections and ever-tighter rules on everything from hospitality to foreign travel has made the life of party members more demanding and uncertain.

A resolution adopted by the central committee last week promised to enforce the rules strictly and to clean up the political environment within the party, identifying a number of practices it would root out.

“We will never allow anyone to commit the following seven types of misconduct: engaging in cronyism and ostracising those outside of their circle; forming self-serving cliques; anonymously lodging false accusations or fabricating rumours; seeking to buy popular support and rig elections in their own favour; promising official posts and lavishing praise on each other for their promotions; doing things their own way and feigning compliance with policies while acting counter to them; and getting too big for their boots and making presumptuous comments on the decisions of the central committee,” it said.

Xi told the meeting that China’s success hinges on the party and that its members must remember their founding mission and always stay modest, prudent and hard-working. The danger is that the never-ending cycle of investigations, detentions and expulsions in the name of party discipline will also make officials fearful, risk-averse and unwilling to tell uncomfortable truths to those above them.

Please let me know what you think and send me your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com