Xi Jinping’s Anti-corruption Campaign and the Third Plenum1
Andrew Wedeman
Department of Political Science
Georgia State University
For the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Roundtable, “Corruption in China Today: Conquences for Governance, Human Rights, and Commercial Rule of Law,” Thursday, November 21, 2013.
A year ago, Xi Jinping assumed the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CCP) in the wake of the most rious corruption scandal since 2006 when Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Chen Liangyu was caught diverting upwards of Y40 billion (US$4.8 billion) from the municipal pension fund to speculative real estate and financial investments. In February 2012, Wang Lijun, who had headed the Chongqing Public Security Bureau until being abruptly “re-assigned” four days earlier to head the city’s educational and environmental offices, fled to the US Consulate in Chengdu allegedly in hopes of obtaining political asylum in the United States. Wang’s failed “defection”
brough t to light allegations that Politburo member and Chongqing Municipal Party S ecretary Bo Xilai’s wife Gu Kailai had murdered an English businessman in an out of the way Chongqing hotel. In the weeks that followed, the Chine rumor mill buzzed about possibl e coup plots involving Bo and the head of the party’s legal and curity committee Zhou Yongkang. Wang, Gu, and Bo was subquently convicted of bribery, embezzlement, and abu of power, with Wang also being convicted of treason. Coming hard on the heels of a scandal involving the former Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun, the Bo ca put Xi under tremendous pressure to launch a major anti-corruption campaign as soon as he entered office. In his first speech as CCP General Secretary, Xi declared:
1 Originally posted by the China Policy Institute – University of Nottingham, available on line at
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There are many pressing problems within the Party that needs to be resolved吝啬怎么读
urgently, especially the graft and corruption cas that occurred to some of the
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Party members and cadres, being out of touch from the general public,高考英语作文模板
elitesbureaucracy and undue emphasis on formalities -- they must be resolved with
great efforts. The whole Party must be vigilant against them. To forge iron, onesplitup
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must be strong. Our responsibility is to work with all comrades in the party, to
make sure the party supervis its own conduct and enforces strict discipline…
(CNN, 11/15/2012).
In a subquent address to the Politburo, Xi doubled down, saying:
A mass of facts tells us that if corruption becomes increasingly rious, it will
inevitably doom the party and the state. We must be vigilant. In recent years,
there have been cas of grave violations of disciplinary rules and laws within the
party that have been extremely malign in nature and utterly destructive politically,
shocking people to the core. (NYT, 11/19/2012).
Strong words, however, only have meaning if they are translated into concrete actions. As the party approaches its Third Plenum a key question is how vigorously has Xi attacked high level corruption over the past year?
thanksforMeasuring the intensity of an anti-corruption campaign is difficult. Abnt any way of measuring the actual rate of corruption it is impossible to know if inroads are being made into the number of officials who are corrupt. It is possible, however, to crudely track changes in the intensity of enforcement by looking at changes in the reported number of officials detained. Figures relead in October 2013 on the number of corruption cas “filed” by the Procuratorate suggest that the total number of cas was up about 3.8% in the first eight months of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012. Other figures relead by the Procuratorate for all of 2012, however, reported a 5.4% increa in cas filed that year and a 6.4% increa in the number of individuals charged. If the two ts of data are comparable, which they may not be, the more recent data would suggest that Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has not produced much of an increa in the number of officials charged with corruption. Moreover, past experience suggests that using partial year figures to extrapolate totals for the year tends yield overestimates. It thus
eleventhems likely that Xi’s new campaign will not produce a significant increa in the number of corruptio
n cas filed but will instead yield numbers approximately equal to tho we have en over the past decade (e Figure 1).
Numbers, however, tell only part of the story. To more fully asss Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, one must look at who has been targeted. According to press reports, thus far Xi’s campaign has claimed 人教版高一英语单词
eight “tigers” – high level, high profile officials (e Table 1). Eight nior officials is about the number of nior officials indicted on corruption charges in recent years (five were indicted in 2012, ven in 2011, six in 2010, and eight in 2009). Xi’s campaign has, however, also snared a number of nior executives of major state-owned companies, including over half a dozen executives of the China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and its subsidiaries Sinopec and PetroChina, as well as a number of mid-level officials and business
persons linked to Li Chuncheng, a former Deputy Secretary of the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee. Arrests of executives, in fact, are one of the few aspects of the current campaign that t it apart from previous drives.
Many of tho detained have direct or indirect ties to former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang (e Figure 2). A native of Wuxi in Jiangsu, Zhou was trained as a petroleum engineer in the mid-1960s and worked in the Liaohe oilfields in Liaoning until he was appointed Vice Minister of the Ministry of Petroleum Industry in 1983. Five years later, he moved to CNPC, rvicing as deputy party cretary and then party cretary before becoming its General Manager in 1996. A year later, he was elected a full member of the 15th CCP Central Committee. In 1998, he was appointed Minister for Land and Resources but then moved to Sichuan to become cretary of the provincial party committee in 1999. Four years later, he returned to Beijing when he was appointed Minister for Public Security and became a member of the Politburo at the 16th Party Congress. In 2007, he left the Ministry of Public Security to become the Secretary and then Director of the Central Committee’s powerful Politics and Law Commission, a position that put Zhou in charge of China’s internal curity and police apparatus, and was elected a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, positions he held
until the 18th Party Congress in 2012, at which point he retired. In the cour of his career Zhou apparently built up a sprawling network of protégés in the oil, resources, and curity apparatus. In the spring of 2012, he was rumored to be connected to Bo Xilai and his campaign to gain a at on t
he Politburo Standing Committee. Today, many e Zhou as a threat to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s efforts to consolidate power within the lea dership. It is widely speculated, therefore, that Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is actually a cover for a major drive against Zhou and his allies. Some obrvers have, in fact, linked the announcement of a new National Security C ouncil as Xi’s attempt to bypass Zhou’s allies in the party’s Law and Politics apparatus.
Targeting Zhou and his allies is, however, a potentially dicey proposition becau Zhou has ties to Z
eng Qinghong, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, who is said to have pla yed a major role in Zhou’s accent to the inner leadership. Zeng, who worked in the petroleum ctor before moving to the Shanghai municipal party committee in 1984, is
