China’s anti-corruption campaign key tool of elite control and insecurity: Report

Naypyidaw, March 21 The central problem with Chinese President Xi Jinping's ongoing anti-corruption campaign is one the Chinese Communist Party has consistently ignored - in a one-party system corruption is not an exception but deeply embedded in the system, a report said on Saturday.

According to a report in Myanmar's media outlet 'Mizzima News', the top Chinese officials, including Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, Sun Zhengcai, and Ling Jihua — who wielded vast institutional influence - were not purged for being “corrupt in a system saturated with corruption”.

The officials were removed because they were uniquely inconvenient to Xi’s consolidation of authority.

“On January 24, China’s Ministry of National Defence released a four-line statement confirming that General Zhang Youxia, Xi Jinping’s second-in-command, childhood acquaintance, and the man Xi himself elevated to the highest operational military post in 2022, had been placed under investigation for ‘serious violations of discipline and law’. With him fell Liu Zhenli, the PLA’s chief of staff and the military’s pre-eminent operational commander," the report detailed.

“The Central Military Commission (CMC), once a seven-member body, now consists of two people: Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin, a political commissar best known for having overseen the investigations into the other five. Whether or not Xi intended this as a statement of strength, it reads unmistakably as one of fear," it mentioned.

The Mizzima News report noted that Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has reached its advanced phase, making it the most extensive and institutionally destructive in the CCP’s history.

“Since 2012, over six million party members have been investigated and punished. In 2024 alone, the number of party members investigated jumped 40 per cent, from 626,000 in 2023 to 877,000.

Addressing delegates during the Fifth Plenum of the CCDI in January, Xi stressed that the party must “press ahead with the anti-corruption fight with a clearer understanding and stronger resolve.”

The anti-corruption drive, it said, whatever genuine reformist purpose the campaign may have had in the years immediately after 2012, has evolved into the primary tool of elite control and insecurity.

The report further said, “In purging Zhang Youxia, his childhood friend, his most trusted appointee and the man he kept on beyond mandatory retirement age, Xi did not demonstrate omnipotence. He demonstrated that, thirteen years and six million investigations in, there is still no one he can trust. That is not the signature of a system being cleaned but signs of a system that is slowly eroding itself.”

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