5
The necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.
—Frederick Engels, On Authority1
Four days before the CCP was to commemorate its victory in the fight against COVID-19 at the Great Hall of the People, an article published on the People’s Daily’s Theory page offered a glimpse of the churn that was underway within the Party. The author, Zang Anmin, General Secretary of the Party’s Organization Department, referred to the quote mentioned in the epigraph from Engels’s 1872 text to argue that implementing the ‘people-centred philosophy’ of development required the Party to maintain a strict organisational line.2 What that meant was absolute adherence to the will of the core leader. While the essence of the argument was not new, the choice of language and the timing of the commentary, which was addressed to Party cadre, were striking. They indicated an underlying anxiety at the very least, if not a sense of crisis, while also sounding a warning to Xi Jinping’s detractors.
Over the years, Xi’s ascent to unparalleled power in the Communist Party had not been without controversy. Factional struggle within the Party was evident in crackdowns on critics and sidelining of political rivals. The anti-corruption campaign that Xi launched early in his first term, promising to take down tigers and flies, was in part a means to this end. For instance, within the first few years of Xi’s rule, senior Party members such as Zhou Yongkang, a former Politburo Standing Committee member, and Ling Jihua, the chief of staff of Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao, were denounced and punished. Among the many allegations against Zhou was the charge of having violated political discipline, the first such case against a senior Party member in decades. Ling Jihua, meanwhile, was charged with not just violating political discipline but also violating something called political protocol. In her research on the anti-corruption campaign, Ling Li, who teaches Chinese politics and law at the University of Vienna, explains that in mid-2014 and early 2015, Xi’s speeches and media editorials highlighted the significance of members following political protocol.3 This, in essence, meant adherence to the converged and unified leadership of the Party centre.4
Throughout his first term, the anti-corruption campaign helped strengthen Xi’s grip on power. Data from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) show that from 2012 to 2017, over 1.8 million officials were punished under the anti-corruption campaign.5 Another 1.1 million officials would be punished in the next two years.6 But the number of fallen tigers or flies was not the most significant outcome of the anti-corruption campaign under Xi. Rather, it was the transformation of the disciplinary regime into a system that would benefit him through the future.7 This transformation, Ling Li argues, has entailed the politicisation of the discipline regime, expanded resource capacity for investigating agencies, changes to evidence production procedures and the strengthening of the authority of the Party’s discipline organs.8 This has been accompanied by the strict implementation of the Ideological Responsibility System, which emphasised loyalty and adherence to the direction laid down by the central leadership as part of the criteria for selecting and evaluating cadres.9 By 2019, the Regulations on the Selection and Appointment of Leading Government and Party Cadres were modified to have Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era, that is, Xi’s governance philosophy, as the guiding principle.10 At the same time, there has been intense focus on boosting ideological and political education across schools and colleges, with Xi Jinping Thought being the guiding factor.11 The aim of these efforts in the long term as Peng Gang, Vice President of Tsinghua University, explains is to ensure that political and ideological values are dissolved across the board like salt is in food so that they can be absorbed naturally.12 In other words, such policies structurally reinforce political loyalty to Xi Jinping as the key determinant in career progression for cadres, along with reinforcing its significance for the growth of private enterprises and guiding social development.
The 2017 takedown of Sun Zhengcai is a case in point in terms of how the discipline enforcement campaign aided Xi’s political objectives. Sun was once viewed as a rising star and even possibly a successor to Xi. However, in July 2017, around three months before the 19th Party Congress, Sun became the first sitting member of the CCP Politburo to be put under investigation.13 At the time, he was serving as the Party Secretary of Chongqing Municipality. At the 19th Party Congress in October then, Xi began his second term as CCP General Secretary, with no successor in sight and his name and philosophy being included in the Party’s constitution. Addressing a panel during the Congress, Liu Shiyu, then chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, said that Sun along with other senior Party members such as Zhou Yongkang, Ling Jihua, Xu Caihou, Guo Boxiong and Bo Xiliai were not only ‘hugely corrupt’ but had ‘plotted to usurp the party’s leadership and seize state power’.14 In an odd twist of fate, in October 2019, Liu was found guilty of making inappropriate public speeches and lacking ‘political vigilance’, along with using his public role for personal gain.15 Yet, his comments during the 19th Party Congress were nothing short of an explosive claim, which underscored the intense nature of backroom power plays within the Communist Party.
By March 2018, Xi managed to further push through key constitutional amendments, removing presidential term limits.16 The limit of two consecutive terms to China’s presidency was put in place under Deng Xiaoping in 1982 as part of a lengthy post-Cultural Revolution reform process to inculcate a system of collective leadership and draw distinctions between the functions of Party organs and state institutions. Consequently, over the years, within the dynamics of the Chinese Party-state system, the presidency has not necessarily entailed commanding the reigns of political power. In comparison, the General Secretary of the Party and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission—both positions that Xi like his predecessors Hu and Jiang Zemin occupies concurrently—are politically far more significant. Yet, the constitutional amendment to remove term limits indicated a broader pattern of reform under Xi, which comprised strengthening the Party at the expense of the state. This, in turn, would allow Xi to more effectively control policy direction.
Two months after these changes, in May 2018, Sun Zhengcai was sentenced to life for taking more than US$ 26 million in bribes.17 Discussing his fate, political analyst Chen Daoyin told the South China Morning Post that while Sun had been sentenced for taking bribes, his downfall was mainly a product of political problems. ‘The message is loud and clear: local leaders should pledge absolute loyalty to the central leadership,’ said Chen.18 This was precisely what Zang Anmin was reinforcing in his 4 September article, as another purge was gathering steam.
Challenging the Core
In early February 2020, legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong published an open letter while still on the run from Chinese authorities. Xu, a long-time critic of Xi Jinping, had already spent four years in prison for the crime of ‘gathering crowds to disrupt public order’.19 Xu had been among the founders of the New Citizens Movement in 2012.20 This was a loose network of lawyers and activists advocating greater awareness about and protection of citizens’ civil rights along with the peaceful transition towards constitutionalism. The crackdown on the New Citizens Movement was followed by the launch of the 709 crackdown in July 2015, which saw mass detention of civil rights lawyers, legal assistants and activists. Upon his release from prison, Xu continued to be present in the public sphere before going into hiding in late 2019. In his February letter, Xu attacked Xi for lacking vision, amassing ‘dictatorial powers’ and empowering and listening to a coterie of ‘banquet buddies’.21 He also dismissed the Belt and Road Initiative as a vanity project and criticised Xi’s handling of the Sino-US trade war, the protests in Hong Kong and the outbreak in Wuhan:
Your prevarication led to an unconfined and explosive spread of what is now a nationwide epidemic. The lessons of [the SARS outbreak in] 2003 are right there in front of your eyes. Do you really mean to tell us that you are completely out of touch and lacking any sensitivity to these facts? A disaster is bad enough, but bungled leadership can make it much worse.
In the end, Xu appealed that Xi must step down for the sake of the country and its people. Within two weeks of the essay becoming public, Xu’s fellow activists revealed that he had been detained in the southern city of Guangzhou while seeking refuge at the home of a lawyer.22 Reports in June suggested that Xu had been formally charged with ‘inciting subversion of state power’.23 However, there remains tremendous uncertainty around his fate. That is not the case with three other high-profile critics of Xi Jinping’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic—Xu Zhangrun, a professor of law at Tsinghua University, property tycoon Ren Zhiqiang and retired Central Party School professor Cai Xia.
On 10 February, Xu Zhangrun, who had criticised Xi’s centralisation of power in a powerful 2018 essay, hit out at not just Xi’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak but also his broader domestic and foreign policies, and prioritisation of political loyalty over professionalism.24 Xu argued that the Party’s failures in the management of the outbreak in Wuhan rested with the ‘The Axle’ or ‘The Ultimate Arbiter’, that is, Xi Jinping, and ‘the cabal that surrounds him’ for cultivating ‘dangerous systemic impotence at every level’.
A political culture has been nurtured that, in terms of the actual public good, is ethically bankrupt, for it is one that strains to vouchsafe its privatized Party-state, or what they call their ‘Mountains and Rivers,’ while abandoning the people over which it holds sway to suffer the vicissitudes of a cruel fate.... The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance; the fragile and vacuous heart of the jittering edifice of the state has thereby been shown up as never before. This viral outbreak, which has been exacerbated by the behavior of the power-holders and turned into a national calamity, is more perilous perhaps than total war itself.
Xu was subsequently detained in July. He was picked up by Chengdu police from his home in Beijing on suspicion of having solicited prostitutes during a trip to the capital city of Sichuan province. His friends and family rubbished the allegations. Speaking about his detention, Australian Sinologist Geremie Barmé said that Xu had foreseen something like this and was thus extremely cautious about being set up.25 He was eventually released six days later. Tsinghua University, however, would immediately sack him for violating ‘standards of professional conduct for teachers’.26
Adding to the chorus of criticism of Xi was Ren Zhiqiang, a prominent Party insider, known to be close to Xi’s Vice President, Wang Qishan. Ren’s father had once served as China’s Deputy Commerce Minister, and Ren and Wang have reportedly known each other since junior high school.27 Despite being born into Party royalty, Ren had been a forthright critic of Xi over the years on social media—an attribute that had earned him the nickname Big Cannon. On several occasions, he had been chastised for such behaviour. For example, in 2016, his social media presence was wiped clean for apparently sharing ‘illegal information’.28 Yet, no coercive action was taken against him. Ren would not be as fortunate this time around. In early March, reports emerged of him being detained in Beijing after an article that he apparently wrote criticising the government’s handling of the pandemic appeared online.29 In the piece, Ren chastised the media for its coverage of the Wuhan outbreak and then vented his ire at Xi, without specifically naming him.
Criticising Xi’s speech at the 23 February televised conference, during which he addressed over 1,70,000 cadre, Ren wrote, ‘I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his “new clothes”, but a clown who stripped naked and insisted on continuing being emperor.’30 He then lashed out at the Party for using ‘propaganda to hush (the) scandal’ of its mishandling of the early outbreak.
The reality shown by this epidemic is that the Party defends its own interests, the government officials defend their own interests, and the monarch only defends the status and interests of the core. Precisely this type of system is capable of a situation where only the ruler’s order is obeyed with no regard for the people. When the epidemic had already broken out, they wouldn’t dare admit it to the public without the king’s command. They wouldn’t dare announce the facts of the matter, and instead used the method of catching and criticizing rumors to restrict the spread of truth, resulting in the disease’s uncontainable spread.31
By mid-March, reports suggested that Ren had likely been placed in detention.32 In early April, authorities in Beijing issued a statement confirming that he was the subject of an investigation.33 By July, he was expelled from the Party for corruption and on charges of ‘smearing the party and country’s image, distorting the party and the military’s history, being disloyal and dishonest with the party’.34 Ren, the Party said, had lost his ideals and convictions and had ‘failed to stay in line’ with the central authorities on matters of principle.35 In late September, a Beijing court sentenced him to 18 years in prison, finding him guilty of graft, bribery, misusing public funds and abuse of power.36
Speaking to The New York Times, Cai Xia termed Ren’s trial as nothing more than ‘political persecution’.37 To her, this was the central leadership under Xi sending a message by ‘killing one to warn a hundred’. Even before Xi assumed the Party’s leadership, Cai had been an ardent proponent of the notion of the Chinese system evolving into some form of a constitutional democracy, with rule of law, human rights and freedom of speech being key ingredients. The regression from these values under Xi, however, increasingly left her disillusioned. In fact, by the time Ren Zhiqiang was sentenced, Cai herself had been caught up in the political maelstrom that the COVID-19 pandemic kicked up after she criticised Xi’s leadership in a speech in May. In her remarks, she lashed out at the manner in which the 2018 constitutional amendments were pushed through, attacked the arbitrary detention of critics and entrepreneurs and demanded the removal of Xi Jinping.
The Party itself is already a political zombie. And this one person, a central leader who has grasped the knife handle, the gun barrel, and faults within the system itself—that is: one, corruption among the officials; and two, the lack of human rights and legal protection for Party members and cadres. With these two grasped in his hands, he has turned 90 million Party members into slaves, tools to be used for his personal advantage. When he needs it, he uses the Party. When he doesn’t need it, Party members are no longer treated as Party members. He can easily put you somewhere and label you as a corrupt official.38
Cai reiterated those remarks subsequently in a detailed interview to The Guardian.39 Since then, she has not been in the mainland, but has continued to be extremely vocal in her criticism of Xi’s leadership. In August, she was formally expelled from the Party and branded a ‘traitor’ who was helping ‘anti-China’ and ‘anti-CPC’ voices in the US.40 Her former employer, the Central Party School, meanwhile, pledged to take note of and avoid ‘major political incidents’ by enhancing the political and ideological training of even retired staff.41
Clearly, the reform that Cai and others like her have been talking about does not appear to be on the horizon. In fact, it appears that there is a hardening of approach. For instance, on 15 July, Party journal Qiushi published a collection of 18 quotes of Xi from 2013 to 2019 as an article to highlight that the most essential feature of Socialism with Chinese characteristics was to uphold the Party’s rule with Xi at its core.42 An explanatory note by Qiushi’s editorial department accompanied the article. It underlined the takeaway and political objective for cadres.
The ‘two maintenances’ are essentially one. Maintaining the core position of General Secretary Xi Jinping implies maintaining the authority of the Party Central Committee and centralized and unified Party leadership; to maintain the authority of the Party Central Committee and centralized and unified leadership, we must first maintain the core position of General Secretary Xi Jinping.43
This message was reinforced by the Organization Department in a People’s Daily piece in late August, which discussed maintaining Xi’s position as the core and the Party’s rule in the context of ‘self-revolution and strict management of the Party’.44 Corruption, the piece argued, can most severely cut the ‘flesh and blood’ ties between the Party and the masses.45 The commentary also spoke about the need for strict anti-corruption action along with carrying out special rectification to achieve these objectives. A pilot version of one such effort to take control of what Cai Xia termed the knife handle, meanwhile, was already underway.
Conjuring the Yan’an Spirit
In late April, Chinese state media announced that Sun Lijun, the country’s 51-year-old Vice Minister of Public Security, was being investigated ‘for suspected severe violations of discipline and law’. The phrase is a euphemism for investigations into charges of corruption. Sun had been dispatched to Wuhan in February at the height of the lockdown in the city. He, in fact, was tasked with coordinating the Party’s response under the command of the Central Leading Group for epidemic prevention and control. Until early March, reports talked about Sun leading ceremonies involving police officers in the city, demanding that they be ‘ready to sacrifice everything for the Party and the people’ and to wear the ‘Party emblem and the flag on their minds forever’.46 In other words, it is a measure of the opacity of politics in China that there was little public indication of the fate that awaited Sun.
Announcing the investigation against him on 19 April, Minister of Public Security Zhao Kezhi said that the charges against Sun were ‘the inevitable result of his long-standing disregard of the Party’s political discipline and rules, disobedience, unruliness, disrespect, and reckless behaviors’.47 Zhao added that the action against Sun demonstrates that
there are no privileges and exceptions ... anyone who violates the party discipline and state laws will be severely investigated and punished. The Party Committee of the Ministry of Public Security resolutely supports the central decision (and) resolutely unifies its thoughts and actions into the decision-making and deployment of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core.
The meeting ended with a commitment to use the Sun Lijun case as a lesson to ‘rectify and improve’ problems that had been plaguing the police and security apparatus. This was the first tangible sign of movement towards a new campaign, although Xi Jinping had referred to the need for ‘education and rectification of the political and legal units’ in remarks at a meeting on the Party’s legal work on 17 January 2020.48
The promised education and rectification campaign was formally launched in July 2020.49 The official announcement said that the first phase of this would entail pilot campaigns covering political and legal units in five cities, four counties and two prisons across five provinces—Heilongjiang, Sichuan, Hunan, Henan and Jiangsu—from July to October 2020.50 The learnings from these efforts would then be utilised to initiate a full-fledged countrywide campaign in 2021, culminating in early 2022. The campaign would impact the entire law enforcement and security apparatus, including police forces, security agencies, courts, prosecutors and prisons. This effort was to be led by Chen Yixin, Secretary General of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (CPLAC), which oversees police officers, prosecutors, courts and prisons. The choice to have him lead the campaign instead of his superior Guo Shengkun, the Secretary of the CPLAC, was indicative of the objective of tightening political control as opposed to simply addressing issues of corruption and graft. Chen is believed to be a trusted aide of Xi Jinping, with them having worked together in Zhejiang between 2002 and 2007. He was also among the key leaders who had been sent to Wuhan in February in order to keep track of political and discipline issues. Media reports and analysts at the time had described Chen as ‘the guy with the emperor’s sword’, who was ‘expected to help restore discipline’ for the Party and government, to oversee law and policy enforcement and control consensus51 as well as coordinate relief efforts across the provinces.’52
Speaking at the meeting announcing the campaign, Chen outlined its aim as creating ‘an ironclad army’ and purging ‘corrupt elements’ from the security and legal apparatus.53 The Party, he said, must ‘drive the blade in’. It must be ‘daring and explore new ways, take real action and rectification to scrape the poison off the bones of our political and legal systems’, he warned.54 In order to achieve this, Chen outlined some key tasks, including targeting ‘two-faced people’ who are ‘disloyal and dishonest to the Party’, a crackdown on ‘protection umbrellas’, improving supervision and management of law enforcement and judicial organs, promoting the spirit of heroes and role models and finally guiding the development of a ‘political police’ force and ‘the political and legal teams to firmly implement the two upholds’.55 Importantly, in his speech, Chen invoked the Yan’an Rectification Movement as a model. This movement refers to an ideological and factional struggle that culminated in establishing Mao Zedong’s absolute authority over the CCP in 1945.
Documenting the series of events that led to the launch of the Yan’an Rectification Movement and the factional jostling, self-criticisms and purges of senior Party members that followed, historian Gao Hua notes that the CCP’s Seventh Party Congress in April 1945,
was the organizational embodiment and confirmation of Mao’s victory after many years of effort and struggle. The Seventh Party Congress can be counted among Mao’s victories; his erstwhile political opponents and a group of key Party and military cadres ascended the podium and in succession admitted their errors and carried out self-criticisms before the Party and Mao. Mao’s instigation of these veteran revolutionaries among the Party leaders apologizing before the entire Party had a very practical significance: Their self-criticisms proved Mao’s correctness, while with their own words they eliminated or diluted their once pervasive influence in the Party and established Mao’s absolute authority.... At the Seventh Party Congress, the entire Party formally accepted Mao Zedong Thought as the CCP’s guiding ideology and course of action, and Mao became the Party’s undisputed supreme leader. His erstwhile political opponents capitulated to Mao before the entire Party, and Mao thoroughly remolded the Party according to his own preferences.56
Chen’s reference to the Yan’an Rectification Movement, therefore, was the sounding of a warning for Xi’s political and ideological opponents. In fact, writing about the campaign in the People’s Daily on 26 August, Chen was categorical in stating that the long-term task of the campaign entails ‘persevering in arming the mind with Xi Jinping’s thinking on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era’.57 The analogy for this process that he offered was that of metallurgy, which required the hammering and tempering of ‘materials repeatedly to improve their purity, strength and resilience, in order to achieve the “special materials”’.58 Moreover, the reference to the Yan’an Rectification Movement perhaps also offers a window into the means and methods that are likely to be deployed through the campaign.
However, before discussing implementation details, it is important to highlight two key points in the lead-up to the campaign’s launch. The first of these is the establishment of the new Building Ping’an China Coordination Small-Group (BPCCSG), led by Guo Shengkun. The group was reportedly established in April 2020,59 but its first formal meeting took place in July.60 The group’s objective is to defuse political and security risks that could emerge amid the internal and external challenges that have sharpened following the pandemic. The July meeting of the BPCCSG ended with the creation of a special task force to boost political policing, with Lei Dongsheng, Vice Secretary-General of the CPLAC, being put in charge. The task force further established two working groups: one to maintain social order and the other to contain risks at the city level.61 Four key threats were identified as particularly problematic—infiltration, subversion and sabotage; violent terrorism; ethnic separatism and religious extremism.62 Remarking on the meeting, analysts such as Gu Su, a political scientist at the Nanjing University, argued that it showed that the central leadership believes it needs ‘more effective and narrowly focused inter-agency coordination on political security given the impact of the pandemic on public opinion and economic performance’.63
The second point to note is that the education and rectification campaign targeting the policing and legal apparatus has linkages to and will draw on the successes of the saohei campaign, which was initiated in 2018. In her study of the campaign, which culminates early in 2021, Sheena Greitens explains that it has been aimed at targeting ‘underworld forces’ or criminal groups and networks facilitating corruption.64 Her assessment of the campaign also reveals the objective of purging the influence of criminal groups within the law enforcement apparatus through the targeting of so-called protection umbrellas. She writes that this phrase refers to ‘officials who provide the shelter of law enforcement and legal cover to organized crime and thereby tolerate and facilitate (and usually profit from) their activities’.65 Importantly, the National Leading Small Group overseeing the saohei campaign was also headed by Chen Yixin. While the numbers vary, ever since it began, the campaign has led to the disciplining and prosecution of tens of thousands of officials, at the very least. Going ahead, one can expect the education and rectification campaign to run concurrently with another round of anti-corruption purges targeting the security and legal apparatus, with the primary objective being to ensure political stability and bolstering Xi’s authority and control.
Assessing the early developments in the education and rectification campaign, Ling Li has argued that based on the experience of similar efforts in the past, what one can expect is ‘a combination of ideological indoctrination, mandatory self-reporting and solicitation of reporting from others on wrong-deeds, which include actual crimes & political violations’.66 The limited reportage on the campaign at the time of this writing appears to corroborate such an assessment.
As of 30 July, reports informed that officials such as Ma Shizhong, Deputy Director of the National Political and Legal Team Education Rectification Pilot Office and Director of the Political Department of the Supreme People’s Court, Pan Yiqin, Director of the Political Department of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, Liu Zhao, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Public Security and Director of the Political Department, and Liu Zhiqiang, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Justice, led teams to pilot zones to initiate the campaign.67 A China News Weekly report in late August covered what the campaign had entailed in Lingbao county in Henan Province, one of the pilot counties.68 A similar approach is believed to have been adopted in other pilot areas. The report informed of a complete shake-up of the entire local security establishment. The county was apparently chosen for the pilot phase because it had been particularly notorious for the nexus between corrupt officials and criminal gangs. The report talked about the ongoing rectification campaign being divided into three phases, the first of which was completed by 15 August. This phase entailed learning and education. As part of this, confessions of individuals such as Liu Zhanqiang, former Deputy Director of the Lingbao Public Security Bureau, were used as tools to warn others about the fate that awaits if they refused to toe the line. In addition, public security officials were subjected to repeated lectures and study sessions. The second phase was expected to involve self-assessment and self-correction by officials. All of this would then lead to the final phase of investigation, which in all likelihood would imply purging of those deemed guilty. Consequently, the report talked about a sense of panic among officials. It also claimed that since the start of the campaign, more than 30 political and legal officials across the country had been investigated.
Some of the most prominent early scalps to have fallen to corruption charges were from the police establishment. These included names such as Gong Dao’an, the Chief of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, Deng Huilin, the Police Chief in Chongqing, and Guo Zhongqiu, another Senior Police Commander.69 In fact, public statements indicated that the Ministry of Public Security had been the most active in pursuing the rectification campaign with vigour. Soon after the announcement of the campaign, Minister of Public Security Zhao Kezhi led an Education Rectification and Mobilization Conference. He emphasised the importance of adhering ‘to the political construction of the police’ and strictly managing the public security agencies across the country.70 ‘Black sheep’ would be identified and targeted in the process of eliminating political, ideological, organisational and operational impurities, he warned. The aim of this effort, Zhao would clarify, is to further strengthen political loyalty of the police and the Party’s leadership over the force through strict discipline enforcement.
A further step in this direction was taken on 26 August, with Xi Jinping conferring a flag to the police force, demanding loyalty to the Party. This symbolised the strengthening control of the Party over the police as opposed to the State Council. However, it is unclear what this means in practical terms, for example with regard to formal reporting mechanisms and chain of command.71 Also on the day, the CPLAC issued a notice on Xi’s instructions, demanding improvement in operational efficiency and discipline, with the primary task being developing a ‘political soul (that is) loyal to the Party’.72 Finally, it is important to note that while the rectification and education campaign is currently only focussed on the security and law enforcement apparatus, there is a parallel, system-wide tightening of supervision across key central and state agencies.
In late August, reports emerged of the fifth round of inspections of 35 central and state agencies. These investigations were carried out by a central team comprising members of the Central Inspection Work Leading Group, CCDI and the National Supervision Commission. The inspections apparently revealed that there existed key ideological challenges that continue to concern the Party’s central leadership, along with the challenges of implementation of its organisational line.73 Moreover, they warned that central inspection teams also received clues regarding some leading cadres, which have been transferred to the CCDI, the National Supervision Commission and the Central Organization Department for handling in accordance with relevant regulations.74
All signs, therefore, point towards two trends. One, continued efforts by Xi Jinping and those close to him to accumulate greater authority through formal75 and other means. Two, a potentially ruthless political purge, with the possibility of intensified factional jostling as the CCP heads towards the 20th Party Congress in 2022. So far, the opposition to Xi seems to be ineffective. Yet, the success of these efforts will be critical for Xi to continue his grip on power, irrespective of whether he seeks a third term as Party General Secretary or not.