Backgrounders December 16, 2024

ANTI-CORRUPTION CAMPAIGNS IN CHINA

by Rahul Karan Reddy

History, Impact and Institutions

Summary

China's leaders have framed corruption as a threat to the Party’s existence and country’s stability. Several anti-corruption campaigns were carried out in the early years of the PRC, and the intensification of corruption since the reform and opening up of China prompted vigorous campaigns by successive leaders. Under Xi Jinping, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中央纪律检查委员会) and National Supervisory Commission (国家监察委员会) have taken on greater significance. China's anti-corruption campaign since 2013 has investigated and prosecuted many high-level members of the Party, PLA and various institutions across the Party-State-Society spectrum in China. The far-reaching anti-corruption campaign conducted during Xi Jinping’s tenure has impacted elite politics in China as well as policy implementation. 

 
 
Corruption has emerged as one of China’s most pressing challenges since its reform and opening up in 1978. As a result, anti-corruption efforts have gradually assumed greater significance in China’s governance structures. Censorate institutions (督察院) have almost always been a part of Chinese governance structures for more than two thousand years, rising and falling in significance during various periods of China’s modern history. In modern China, corruption and anti-corruption efforts received greater attention from top leaders after the deepening of economic reforms in the 1980’s and 1990’s. With corruption becoming more prominent, complex and networked — intersecting with patronage networks and the private sector— campaigns have been launched by Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping to tackle what has been framed as an existential threat to the Party’s existence and country’s stability. Anti-corruption campaigns became a signature characteristic of Xi Jinping’s leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), with agencies like the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中央纪律检查委员会) and National Supervisory Commission (国家监察委员会) taking on greater significance. 
 
Corruption in China: Definition and Types

Corruption can be narrowly defined as “use of public authority for personal gain”. Corruption has also evolved to include behaviours that the Party has deemed unacceptable, unhealthy and amoral over time. One broadly accepted framework of corruption in China classifies practices into three categories: 

• The first category includes graft, bribes, fraud, embezzlement, extortion, smuggling, tax evasion etc, which are economic crimes meant to increase the personal wealth of officials. 

• The second category includes behaviours and practices by members of public institutions to increase the wealth and power of their institutions and staff through illegal and semi-legal activities. It includes behaviours considered unhealthy, like spending public money for luxurious work and lifestyle conditions, extravagance and waste, excessive spending on entertainment and travel etc. 

• The third category refers to preferential treatment or nepotism in personnel appointment and promotions and favourable treatment of relatives of officials, friends and associates, which facilitate the creation of personal networks.
 
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the Party body responsible for anti-corruption work, reports corruption cases under two broad categories; the first, formalism and bureaucracy and the second, hedonism and extravagance (Table 1).
 
Table 1: Corruption Types Reported by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection
 
Origin of Anti-Corruption Institutions
 
The Yushi Tai, or Imperial Censorate, of the Han dynasty was the first permanent central supervisory agency established in China. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty (157 – 87 BC) was an anti-corruption campaigner who established the office of regional inspector to supervise officials in 13 provinces. The Yushi Tai was replaced by the Ming dynasty with the duchayuan (都察院), and eight Chief Investigating Censors were appointed to inspect twelve provinces of the empire. This structure remained in place until the end of the Chinese empire in 1911 and become the model for the Control Yuan (監察院) under the Republic of China. The Control Yuan was part of five branches of government, responsible for investigating and disciplining government officials engaged in misconduct and abuses of power. 
 
The CPC, at its second National Congress in 1922 adopted its constitution which included a chapter on discipline, without a specialised agency for enforcement. It was only the fifth Party Congress in 1927 that elected the Central Supervisory Committee, which was subsequently replaced by the Inspection Committee in 1928, with Liu Shaoqi as Secretary to "supervise the finances, accounting and work of various organs of party departments at all levels." In 1934, the Central Party Affairs Committee was elected to become the organ for unified leadership and supervision within the Party, and in 1937 it was expanded to conduct educational and intra-party organisational work. In the following year, the sixth Central Committee decided to establish a supervisory committee under the district party committee responsible for disciplinary penalties. The tasks and powers of the Central and Local Supervisory Committees were defined only in 1945 at the 7th Party Congress, which were “to decide or cancel the punishment of party members and accept complaints from party members”. When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949, the Central People's Government Council established the People’s Supervisory Committee of the State Council. The CCDI was also established by the Central Committee of the CPC, with Zhu De as Secretary. 
 
Several anti-corruption campaigns were carried out in the early years of the PRC, although they were a guise to promote ideological conformity and political loyalty. The Three-Anti Campaign in 1951, New Three Anti Campaign in 1952 and the Five-Anti Campaign in 1953 purged large numbers of cadres and disrupted the organisational capacity of the Party and morale of public officials. A major test of the country’s anti-corruption apparatus and Party leadership as a whole was the Gao Gang and Rao Shushi affair in 1954. Accused of factionalism by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, Gao Gang (controlled industrialised regions on northeast China and was Chairman of the Planning Commission) and Rao Shushi (Chairman of the Administrative Committee of East China and head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee) were purged. The incident revealed the defects of the anti-corruption system. It led to the replacement of the CCDI with the Central and Local Supervisory Committees in 1955, to “prevent the recurrence of incidents such as the anti-Party alliance of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi that seriously endanger the interests of the Party.” The new system was meant to partially allow anti-corruption and discipline organs to operate independently from the regular party structure and penetrate the lower levels of the Party. Anti-corruption organs of the party witnessed their powers expand and contract over the next two decades, driven by the turmoil of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. 
 
Anti-Corruption After 1978 
 
The supervisory system was restored in December 1978 at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, which elected the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) with Chen Yun as the first Secretary. The CDIC held its first Plenary Session in Beijing, formulating "Some Rules Governing Political Life in the Party” to enforce collective leadership, prevent arbitrary decision making, struggle against unhealthy practices and so on. The Constitution of the Party adopted in 1982 stipulated that the CDICs at all levels were to be elected by the Party Congress at the same level, but would work under a dual supervision system, controlled by the Party Committee and the higher-level Discipline and Inspection Commission (DIC). Given that economic liberalisation opened up new avenues for corruption, the DICs mainly investigated “capitalist liberalisation” (资本主义自由化) and “unhealthy tendencies” (不正之风). Between 1983 and 1987, the CDIC replaced its ad-hoc inspection teams with 21 departments and agencies to undertake investigations into discipline issues and also social problems. For example, a CDIC team was sent to Guangdong and Shenzhen to study the ideological confusion and moral degradation among government officials after the reforms. China’s discipline inspection institutions suffered a setback in 1987 when Zhao Ziyang argued that the CDIC should not be involved in legal and administrative violations. As a result, 49 discipline inspection groups were abolished and more importantly, a Politburo Standing Committee seat was no longer reserved for the CDIC chief. 
 
The Tiananmen square protests refocused attention back on Party loyalty and discipline. Combating corruption was declared a crucial goal at the 14th Party Congress and by 1993, inspection teams were dispatched to party organs and government departments. The CCDI was merged with the State Council’s Ministry of Supervision and in the year following the merger, DICs were authorised to apply coercive measures during investigations, including detentions and search and seizures. The 1990s witnessed severe corruption due to the further opening up of the economy and Party members decided that anti-corruption efforts would have to shift away from campaigns and power-driven approaches to institution building and rule construction that emphasised prevention and punishment. Several institutional regulations and responses were initiated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, like the “Regulations on Disciplinary Punishment of the Communist Party of China (Trial)” and “Implementation Outline for Building an Anti-Corruption System of Punishment and Prevention That Emphasizes Education, Institutions, and Supervision” which has provided the basic structure for disciplinary work undertaken even today. Additionally, Jiang Zemin’s anti-corruption campaign in 1995 implicated high profile members of the Party like Politburo members, Chen Xitong and Wang Baosen, sending shockwaves across the Party. By 2003, the Office for Circuit Inspection Work was established to observe local party and government officials, a prominent watchdog in the Party’s fight against corruption. 
 
But China’s anti-corruption work suffered from serious shortcomings, evidenced by the resignation of CCDI Chief Wei Jianxing in 2000, who protested the weakness of anti-corruption institutions in dealing with corrupted officials. By the time of Hu Jintao’s second term, between 1992 and 2009, the CCDI had brought disciplinary sanctions against 2 million personnel and the number of circuit inspection teams increased from 5 in 2003 to 12 in 2013. However, corruption continued to remain a severe problem for the Party, challenging its legitimacy. Hu Jintao, in his speech on July 1st 2011, commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Party, warned that rampant corruption was one of the four challenges “more strenuous and pressing than at any other point”. 
 
Anti-Corruption Under Xi Jinping 
 
Xi Jinping’s ascent to leadership of the Party and State was marked by the Bo Xilai scandal, which followed the high-profile probe into Liu Zhijun for corruption in China’s High-Speed Railway program, exposing the severity of corruption within the Party. In his first speech as General Secretary of the Party, Xi said, “There are many pressing problems within the Party that needs to be resolved urgently, especially the graft and corruption cases that occurred to some of the Party members and cadres, being out of touch from the general public, bureaucracy and undue emphasis on formalities – they must be resolved with great efforts.” Xi Jinping has framed the problem of corruption as existential for the party, without which the Party and State would collapse. Xi quickly identified the targets for his anti-corruption campaign. At the 18th Party Congress, he stated, “We must uphold the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time, resolutely investigating law-breaking cases of leading officials and also earnestly resolving the unhealthy tendencies and corruption problems which happen all around people”. High-ranking officials, termed tigers (老虎) and grassroots level cadres and civil servants, called flies (蒼蠅), were to be scrutinised for corrupt behaviour.
 
The Eight point code, called the “Eight-point Regulation on Improving the Work Style and Close Interaction with Crowds”, was soon released to restrict official behaviour, which banned the use of luxury cars, lavish gifts, reduced banquets, ceremonies, visits and meetings. Restrictions were also placed on alcohol consumption at military functions, purchases of extravagant houses and radio and TV advertisements for luxury goods. The Party issued various regulations and orders such as the “Regulations on Party and Government Organs to Practice Economy and Oppose Waste”, detailing activities that were now prohibited and instructed officials to perform duties economically and deepen supervision. The scope of anti-corruption work was expanded in June 2013 during a conference to inaugurate a mass-line education campaign, where Xi Jinping emphasised the cleanup of undesirable work styles like formalism and bureaucratism, along with hedonism and extravagance. The Central Committee in late 2013 issued the “2013-2017 Work Plan for Establishing and Improving the System of Punishing and Preventing Corruption”, an outline for the future of anti-corruption work. The Plan emphasised improving the work style of the Party, intensifying investigations, deepening education and strengthening the top-level design of anti-corruption efforts. 
 
Xi’s anti-corruption campaign investigated and prosecuted many high-level members of the Party and PLA in the early stages of the campaign. Several high-profile tigers were investigated and dismissed in connection with former Politburo Standing Committee member and head of China’s security apparatus, Zhou Yongkang, in 2013. Zhou was expelled from the Party in December 2014 for a “serious disciplinary violation”. In 2013, Gu Junshan, the former deputy head of the PLA General Logistics Department, who was already charged with bribery, embezzlement and power abuse saw his case intensify. Gu was the highest ranked military official to be charged with corruption since 2006 and his case led to investigations into high-ranking members of the PLA, like Xu Caihou. Xu Caihou, former Politburo member and vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was expelled from the Party in June 2013. By the end of 2014, Ling Jihua, Hu Jintao’s former Chief of Staff, was accused of heading a political group called the Xishan society in Shanxi and was prosecuted for conducting unorganized political activity. Several other high profile officials like Sun Zhengcai and Su Rong were also ensnared in the early stages of the campaign.
 
The CCDI, under the leadership of Xi Jinping’s ally, Wang Qishan, sent Central Inspection Teams in 2013 to conduct inspections in provinces, central enterprises and government departments. The CCDI conducted 20 inspections in 2013 (11 provinces, 3 government agencies, 4 SOEs, 4 state funded institutions), 39 in 2014, which increased to 41 in 2015, 45 in 2016, 30 in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. In the first five years of the campaign, 440 senior officials from the Party were probed and among those, 43 were members of the Central Committee and over 2 million lower level officials were investigated. 15,000 of them received punishments for violations of Party discipline. The Supreme People’s Procuratorate has reported that in the first five years of the campaign, 254,419 officials were prosecuted, including 120 high ranking officials at the ministerial level and economic losses recovered from the prosecution amounts to 53.3 billion yuan.
 
China’s anti-corruption campaign also extended itself to bring back criminals and offenders who fled overseas. Launched in 2014 and 2015, Operation Fox Hunt and Sky Net, were designed to coerce or cajole officials and other fugitives who fled China. Between 2014 and 2022, 10,105 people including foreign citizens were forcefully returned to China from over 120 countries, mostly via coercive, irregular methods like kidnapping and entrapment. The most high-profile case of these operations involves Meng Hongwei, the former INTERPOL chairman, who disappeared in France and reappeared in China, where he was imprisoned.
 
The anti-corruption campaign deepened and became more institutionalised in Xi Jinping’s second term to target corruption within nearly every institution of state and society. With the creation of the National Supervision Commission (NSC) in 2018, enforcement gaps in the campaigns were plugged, with millions of state employees now under the scanner. Furthermore, the Rules of the Chinese Communist Party for Disciplinary Action, Regulations for Chinese Communist Party Accountability  and Law on Governmental Sanctions for Public Employees further revised the regulations and codes to strengthen anti-corruption efforts. By 2021, a total of 210 intraparty regulations at the central level, 162 at the ministerial level and 3,210 at local levels were issued to institutionalise anti-corruption efforts. In 2020, the anti-corruption campaign targeted state officials like police, judges and prosecutors to eliminate disloyalty and indiscipline. It also turned its attention to officials in the financial sector, like personnel employed in banks and asset management companies. Institutions like China Investment Corporation, China Development Bank (CDB), Agricultural Development Bank of China (ADBC), China Everbright Group and People’s Insurance Company (Group) of China (PICC) were placed under investigation in 2017 and later in 2023, along with 30 State-owned agencies in the finance, banking, education and energy sectors. Even the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was targeted since it involved provincial governments, state banks and private businesses. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, the CCDI and NSC investigated local efforts to prevent the spread of the virus, leading to punishments for officials who insufficiently implemented policies or performed poorly. Investigations also targeted the medical sector, land management bureaus, defence enterprises and various institutions across the Party-State-Society spectrum in China. 
 
Since the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, China’s anti-corruption efforts have targeted various departments of the Chinese military, like the PLA Rocket Force, Ministry of Defence and Political Work Department of the PLA. Even high-ranking members of the Chinese government like its former Foreign Minister, Qin Gang, have been ensnared in corruption campaigns and disappeared from public view. Private sector entities in various sectors of the economy like the pharmaceutical and hospital sectors, and even in sporting fields like football, have been targeted. Even China’s anti-corruption investigation agencies, CCDI and NSC, are also not immune from the campaign, with the Party core asking them to “turn the blade inwards”, a description for the campaigns focus on law enforcement and security apparatus of the country. For instance, China’s former Justice Minister, Tang Yijun, was placed under investigation in May 2024. Even CCDI officials, like Hao Zongqiang, the deputy head of CCDI’s publicity department, have been investigated for corruption. The far-reaching anti-corruption campaign conducted during Xi Jinping’s tenure has impacted elite politics in China as well as policy implementation. 
 
Implications for Party Politics and Governance 
 
Some scholars have argued that the anti-corruption campaign is an instrument of power wielded by Xi Jinping to eliminate rivals and rival factions, consolidate his power and build up his own faction. The investigations into powerful rivals of Xi Jinping in 2013, like Zhou Yongkang, Ling Jihua and many others allude to the possibility that some targets of the campaign were chosen to eliminate rival factions and install loyalists. The targeting of senior leadership within the Party has also partly eroded the collective leadership mechanism of decision making at the highest levels. Similarly, the anti-corruption campaign has diminished the power of the State and enhanced the power of the Party over all social and political affairs. The anti-corruption campaign, along with other measures, has also reinforced the top-down policy making structure in China.
 
China’s anti-corruption campaign, now over a decade-long, has impacted policy making as well. The campaign has made officials risk-averse, given the severe scrutiny on policy decisions. It has resulted in the problem of officials “lying flat” or unwilling to make decisions, innovate and experiment on policy problems. As the anti-corruption campaign continues to expand into lower levels of society and the Party-State, with the latest target being villages and corruption at the grassroot level, China’s policy makers and cadres are forced to navigate an uncertain and challenging environment for political survival. 

Author

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Rahul Karan Reddy

Rahul Karan Reddy is a Senior Research Associate at Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA). He works on domestic Chinese politics and trade, producing data-driven research in the form of reports, dashboards and digital media. He is the author of ‘Islands on the Rocks’, a monograph about the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute between China and Japan. Rahul was previously a research analyst at the Chennai Center for China Studies (C3S). He is the creator of the India-China Trade dashboard and the Chinese Provincial Development Indicators dashboard. His work has been published in The Diplomat, East Asia Forum, ISDP & Tokyo Review, among others. He can be reached via email at rahulkaran.reddy@gmail.com and @RahulKaranRedd1 on Twitter.

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China Party Politics and Governance Society

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