President Xi vows to wage ‘Enduring anti-corruption campaign’ in China
View(s):BEIJING (Bloomberg), Jan 14 -BEIJING (Bloomberg), Jan 14 -President Xi Jinping said there will be no let-up in his “fierce and enduring” battle against corruption, which has already taken down thousands of senior officials including the country’s former security chief.
Xi vowed to maintain “high pressure” and “zero tolerance” on graft this year, as corruption “has not vanished” and “temptations still remain,” in speech at a plenary session of the Communist Party’s top disciplinary agency in Beijing yesterday.
“The anti-graft work in 2014 was effective and the campaign was a matter of life-or-death for the party and the nation,” Xi was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying at the plenum of Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. “The situation remains arduous and complex.”
While Xi is seeking to address a problem that he says risks undermining the party’s legitimacy, he is also trying to weaken some well-entrenched vested interests and consolidate his power, according to Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director for government and international studies at Hong Kong Baptist University.
“Xi wants to turn what is a campaign into a standard practice aimed at, if not ferreting out corruption, at least keeping it under control; hence the longevity of this new crackdown,” Cabestan said in an e-mail interview. “The jury is still out as far as the results of this campaign are concerned; obstacles to deepening reforms are still formidable.”
Flies and Tigers
His crackdown on graft — the harshest since the republic’s founding in October 1949, according to state media — kicked off weeks after he became party boss in November 2012 and has snared more than 100,000 communist cadres, including both “flies and tigers,” or low- and high-level officials, according to CCDI figures released last month.
The past two years bear out the importance of “catching tigers,” Li Chengyan, director of the Research Centre for Government Integrity Building at Peking University, said in a phone interview. “Only beating big tigers can exert a sufficient deterrent effect.”
In the speech, Xi cited for the first time the names of Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee in charge of domestic security, and Ling Jihua, a former top aide of retired president Hu Jintao, as high-profile examples in his graft-busting efforts. These cases “demonstrated to the world the Communist Party has a head-on approach to problems and correcting mistakes,” Xi said, calling the effort “self-purifying.”
Campaign Risk
The risk of Xi’s anti-graft drive has “probably receded” since Zhou was formally put under investigation in July, according to Cabestan.
“For Xi, the most dangerous period was prior to July when he had to convince the leadership and the elder leaders of the party to get rid of Zhou and prosecute him,” he said.
In laying out goals and challenges for this year, Xi stressed the importance of institutionalizing his campaign. “Only by making it into a habit, a norm” can we deliver long-run and lasting impacts, he said.
Xi said this year’s anti-graft work would focus on strengthening official accountability mechanisms, keeping a closer eye on family members and close allies of potentially corrupt officials, and improving supervision of state-owned enterprises, a corruption-plagued area that saw hundreds of senior officials toppled in the past two years.
“The party’s work-style construction and anti-graft campaign is always on the road,” Xi said.
Xi’s speech shows this year’s anti-corruption work won’t be light, said Li of Peking University.
“It’s wise and necessary to single out the SOEs as one of the focuses, as it’s a high-risk area and has become a hotbed of corruption,” Li said. “There’s a lot of collusion between power and money there, and many officials just use the SOEs as their private coffers.”