Looking back at Chinese politics in 2024, one plainly visible feature is that corruption among CCP officials has sprung up like mushrooms after rain. Especially striking has been the string of scandals engulfing senior PLA generals: two successive defense ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe, were brought down over corruption tied to the Rocket Force; Miao Hua, a member of the Central Military Commission and director of its Political Work Department, was also taken down in December; and as the year drew to a close, two former deputy commanders of the Army and the Southern Theater Command were also implicated in serious violations of the law. Corruption in the military is merely the tip of the iceberg of corruption throughout China's officialdom as a whole. By incomplete count, 59 centrally managed cadres were purged this year, up more than a quarter from 45 last year. Of these 59 senior officials, nine held the full provincial-ministerial rank, including Wu Cunrong, chairman of the Shanxi Provincial Political Consultative Conference, who was investigated not long ago, as well as Tang Yijun, chairman of the Jiangxi Provincial Political Consultative Conference and former justice minister; Tang Renjian, minister of agriculture and rural affairs; and Gou Zhongwen, former director of the General Administration of Sport—setting a new record since the anti-corruption drive began at the 18th Party Congress in 2012, with one or two senior officials falling almost every week. As for officials below the vice-provincial/ministerial level who have been investigated, there are no precise statistics available, but the number this year is likely in the tens of thousands at the very least. The “Tiger-Hunting” Scorecard Actually Proves the Anti-Corruption Campaign Has Failed The authorities present the ever-rising number of purged senior officials as evidence of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption campaign, proof of their so-called resolve. From a propaganda standpoint, one cannot really fault them for "talking it up" this way—indeed, if the campaign lacked real resolve, so many senior officials would not have fallen. And yet this very "tiger-hunting" scorecard is precisely what proves the anti-corruption drive has, at its core, failed. If one looks only at the number of officials purged in any one or two years, the anti-corruption campaign appears to be advancing triumphantly. But stretch the timeline out, and the overall trend from 2012 to the present shows that the campaign has genuinely failed. Why say this? By ordinary logic, under a vigorous anti-corruption drive, the number of officials purged should be high in the first few years, but as a comprehensive set of anti-corruption institutions and mechanisms is established and refined, the number of officials investigated should steadily decline, eventually approaching zero—that would be the normal pattern. If instead the number of fallen officials keeps rising, that shows the campaign has failed, or at least has not succeeded. This is exactly the pattern the authorities have shown: high, then low, then high again. In the first few years after the 18th Party Congress, under Wang Qishan's direction of the anti-corruption effort, the number of purged senior officials rose year after year, but in the first three years after the 19th Party Congress, official statistics show the number declining somewhat. That trend did not hold, however, over the following two years: after 2020, the numbers of both investigated senior officials and cadres found violating the Eight-Point Regulation again set new records year after year. One line of defense explains this by arguing that China's stock of accumulated corruption is simply too large, so that any intensified anti-corruption effort will inevitably turn up large numbers of fallen officials. This explanation seems to be borne out by the fact that a considerable share of the officials investigated in recent years had already been retired for several years, or even more than a decade—in a few extreme cases, as long as thirty years.
This defense, however, does not hold up, because even as the authorities trace corruption back through the years, official announcements about many of these officials never fail to add the phrase "continued to offend even after the 18th Party Congress." Clearly, in the authorities' own framing, corruption before the 18th Party Congress is treated as legacy corruption, while corruption continuing after it counts as new corruption. Take the nine full provincial-ministerial officials mentioned above: four were in active posts, and three had stepped back to serve in the National People's Congress or the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference—positions which, strictly speaking, also count as active service—together making up the majority of those purged. Even excluding the two already-retired officials, these seven still outnumber those from previous years. And corruption among senior PLA generals has likewise mostly involved rising stars within the military, even confidants of the powerholders in Zhongnanhai—textbook cases of new corruption. So for most of the corrupt officials who have fallen, the reality is that their corruption combines both legacy and new elements, which cannot be strictly separated. That the authorities' anti-corruption campaign has not achieved victory can also be glimpsed in how recent plenary communiqués of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection have described each year's anti-corruption deployments. The communiqué of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in 2022 called for a focused crackdown on corruption behind disorderly capital expansion and platform monopolies, cutting the ties binding power to capital, resolutely investigating corruption in infrastructure construction and public resource transactions, continuing to advance governance of corruption in the financial sector, deepening anti-corruption work at state-owned enterprises, and intensifying targeted rectification of corruption in grain procurement and sales. The communiqué of the Commission's second plenary session in 2023 called for more forcefully containing new corruption while more effectively eliminating legacy corruption, resolutely investigating major corruption cases, seriously investigating cases where political and economic problems are intertwined, stepping up anti-corruption efforts in state-owned enterprises, finance, the political-legal system, grain procurement and sales, and development-zone construction, keeping a close watch on key targets, and seriously investigating cases in which the spouses, children, their spouses, and staff of leading cadres exploit their influence for personal gain. The communiqué of the Commission's third plenary session in 2024 stated that it would continue to closely monitor key problems, key sectors, key targets, and new and disguised forms of corruption, make severely punishing corruption arising from collusion between officials and businesspeople a top priority in this uphill battle, and deepen the rectification of corruption in finance, state-owned enterprises, energy, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, infrastructure projects, and bidding processes. Comparing the wording of these three years of Central Commission for Discipline Inspection plenary communiqués, it is not hard to see that, despite some differences in specific approach, the overall direction has remained consistent: punishing both legacy and new corruption equally severely, and making those who have brazenly continued offending since the 18th Party Congress the top priority. Moreover, sectors like state-owned enterprises and finance have remained anti-corruption priorities for years on end, which shows that corruption in these fields has never stopped regenerating itself and has not eased at all despite the authorities' continually intensifying anti-corruption efforts.
CCP Corruption Is Built Into the System Itself None of this is to deny that, over all these years, the authorities have brought down "tigers" both large and small, or that this has had no deterrent effect at all on their so-called rectification of conduct and strict governance of the Party. But the very fact that more "tigers" fall every single year proves, conversely, that CCP corruption cannot be fundamentally curbed or corrected. It is in this sense that the authorities' anti-corruption campaign can be called a failure. The root of that failure lies in the fact that CCP corruption is a form of corruption built into the system itself, which can only be cured by reforming the political system. Yet even as the current anti-corruption drive tries to build institutions to curb the frequent outbreak of corruption, it does nothing whatsoever about the most fundamental problem—the concentration of power—and even further reinforces power's domination over society. Combined with the authorities' refusal to allow any outside oversight, this means that anti-corruption efforts within the Party, which appear to turn the blade inward on itself, only cut into the flesh without touching the bone, scraping away the surface without ever curing the underlying poison. Corruption arises when power is excessive and lacks any effective restraint, leading to its abuse. The best check on power is the separation of powers, but under a one-party system—especially a party-state structure like China's, in which everything revolves around a single supreme leader—not only is external separation of powers impossible, even internal checks and balances are extremely difficult to establish. This renders oversight and restraint over power holders at every level of the Party, especially the top leader in each unit and above all the supreme leader himself, entirely ineffective—indeed, effectively impossible. The model of strict Party governance and anti-corruption now employed by the powerholders in Zhongnanhai amounts to this: I alone may be an emperor subject to no oversight or restraint whatsoever, but the officials beneath me—from the premier down to the village chief—must not become little emperors of their own. This is how they hope to eliminate corruption. The problem is that preventing officials from becoming petty emperors requires a functioning system of oversight from superiors over subordinates, which depends on two things: first, letting the whole of society participate in oversight, so that the masses' sharp eyes stay fixed on officials; and second, ensuring that superiors can actually direct the oversight bodies below them. Yet the current anti-corruption model rejects the first point entirely—the authorities fear that allowing mass oversight would let the anti-corruption campaign spiral out of control and threaten Party rule. As for the second point, although lower-level oversight bodies are formally obligated to cooperate with those above them, when the fate of a lower-level oversight body rests in the hands of the top Party official at that same level, what it actually obeys is the local Party committee—especially its top official—rather than the higher oversight authority, making it very difficult for higher oversight bodies to exert any substantive oversight over lower Party and government leaders. This is without even mentioning the webs of interest that bind officials together up and down these vertical chains of command. Even granting, for argument's sake, that intensified anti-corruption efforts could curb misconduct and corruption among officials big and small beneath the leader, who is left to supervise and restrain the leader himself, should he turn corrupt? Or suppose the leader is personally clean and self-disciplined—what about his family, his confidants, and the very oversight tools he uses to strike at official corruption, if they engage in corruption in his name or behind his back? Who can supervise or restrain them? After all, the leader is only human, not some being with three heads and six arms; he cannot possibly spend enormous amounts of time and energy personally supervising officials, nor does he have the capacity to do so—he must rely on the Party's oversight system, and even on his own confidants and family. But once these two fail, there is no last line of defense left. And who can guarantee that the system and the people he relies on will not abuse their power? If those close to the leader keep on being corrupt regardless, then officials both great and small further down will find some way to be corrupt too, no matter how hard the authorities crack down.
Perhaps the powerholders in Zhongnanhai refuse to believe otherwise, convinced that corruption can be brought under control through their own thunderous methods. But the authorities are, in fact, well aware that corruption rooted in the system itself cannot be curbed, and so they use vague formulations like "phased victory in the anti-corruption struggle" or "the fight against corruption is a never-ending journey" to deceive the public and keep society hoping the campaign will succeed. Just as declared at the Politburo's own "democratic life" self-criticism meetings, the authorities' anti-corruption efforts are genuine enough—but as in the myth of Sisyphus, without reform of the political system, without separating Party from government, without a separation of powers, without external oversight, and without public disclosure of officials' assets, no matter how forcefully the anti-corruption campaign is waged, it will, in the long run, ultimately prove futile.