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Yuanyue Dang

William Zheng

The South China Morning Post has launched a major data project diving into President Xi Jinping’s signature anti-graft campaign. In the fourth part of an accompanying series, Yuanyue Dang and William Zheng delve into the broader reach of the campaign.
While economic crimes are often seen as the target of President Xi Jinping’s crusade against corruption, the campaign has become much wider.
Thirteen years since it began, it is now increasingly about how officials use their power, whether they toe the line, and what they do in their private lives.
The South China Morning Post analysed the findings of hundreds of disciplinary investigations conducted by the anti-corruption watchdog from 2013 to 2025. The findings suggest that Xi’s campaign has expanded from economic corruption to a broader effort to reshape how the bureaucracy is run.
While bribery is still the legal foundation for cases to enter the court system, political loyalty, discipline, policy implementation and cadre management have become part of how corruption is defined and punished in China.
The SCMP analysis looked at the cases of 423 cadres who were “centrally managed” – meaning senior officials who reported directly to the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party.
Cadres at this level are overseen by the party’s personnel agency – the Central Organisation Department – which is responsible for administration, assessment and recommendations on who is in and who is out.
Most cadres in the analysis were ranked at deputy provincial or ministerial level or above. A small number were slightly lower in rank but headed financial institutions, state-owned enterprises or other key organisations.




The findings analysed were released by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection after an investigation and most cases were then passed to judicial authorities.
They are not court judgments and do not provide a complete account of the evidence held by investigators, but are more like a public explanation from the authorities as to why an official crossed a red line.
‘Political sin’
The anti-corruption campaign was launched after Xi became China’s top leader in 2013. Beijing has said there would be “no forbidden zones, full coverage and zero tolerance”.
As the campaign has rolled on, the CCDI has released longer statements on its investigations, mainly to include political-related accusations.
Economic crimes have remained part of nearly every case. But these cases now include allegations involving “improper” banquets, resisting investigation, and issues around policy implementation, use of power and political risk.
Of the 423 cases reviewed, 93.4 per cent of the officials were accused of using their positions to seek benefits for others. Some 88.7 per cent were accused of taking bribes, and 67.1 per cent were accused of accepting cash or gifts.
These were the three most common allegations.
Economic corruption and integrity violations accounted for 52.4 per cent of the allegations from 2013 to 2017 – about five years after the party congress when Xi became leader.
In the next five years to 2022, they made up 43.2 per cent of the allegations, and in the period from 2023 to 2025 it was 46.4 per cent.
This does not mean bribery has become less important in the campaign, rather that the party’s definition of corruption is now broader.
Qian Jingyuan, an assistant professor of political science at Boston College, said this reflected the dual nature of the campaign.
“From Beijing’s perspective, corruption has been viewed not just as an economic crime, but also as a political sin,” Qian said.
“Thus, public announcements must emphasise the political nature of an official’s wrongdoing before the economic aspects, while the latter often constitute the substantive basis for the criminal indictment.”
Power and conduct
To assess how the campaign has changed over time, the SCMP analysis divided the cases into three periods in line with the party congress cycles, according to the year the CCDI released its findings.
There were 159 cases from 2013 to 2017; 124 from 2018 to 2022; and 140 from 2023 to 2025.
From 2013 to 2017, 18.9 per cent of cases contained allegations involving political security or political risk.
The CCDI accusations included seeking political patronage, forming cliques and factions, damaging the political environment, saying one thing while doing another, associating with political swindlers and engaging in superstitious activities.
There was a jump in these cases – to 64.5 per cent – in the period from 2018 to 2022. They fell slightly to 59.3 per cent in the period from 2023 to 2025.
The language used in these allegations is in line with the Regulations on CPC Disciplinary Action – or rules of conduct within the party – which underwent a major revision in 2015.
Six forms of discipline are listed: political, organisational, integrity, “mass” discipline governing relations with the public, work and personal conduct.
As political allegations have increased, there have been fewer occurrences of specific claims like forming cliques or making improper comments about the central leadership.


Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of Study Times, the official newspaper of the Central Party School, said that reflected a move away from dealing with questions of political alignment and towards more detailed scrutiny of administrative conduct.
“After the major political cliques like [those of former public security vice-minister] Sun Lijun have been brought down, Beijing’s effort went into the details of how the senior cadres use their power, and their conduct,” Deng said.
“Systematic power abuse will lead to systematic economic and social risks. Abusive official conduct will accumulate social discontent. Both are dangerous for the legitimacy and the long-term rule of the Communist Party.”
When an official’s political loyalty is questioned, they are often also accused of concealing personal matters, lying during interviews, or resisting investigation, according to the SCMP analysis.
These allegations appeared in 48.4 per cent of cases in the 2013-17 period.
That jumped to 82.3 per cent from 2018 to 2022, and reached 88.6 per cent in the 2023-25 period.
This has coincided with an expansion of the supervisory system. China amended the constitution in 2018 to establish supervisory commissions at every level and enacted the Supervision Law.
The commissions – which work with discipline inspectors – extend oversight from party cadres to all officials who exercise public power.
An expanded detention system known as liuzhi replaced the party’s largely informal shuanggui disciplinary system.
The way anti-corruption bodies publish their investigation findings and their format has also become more standardised since the law took effect.
Qian from Boston College said the campaign had brought “both greater institutionalisation of cadre supervision and more personalised control”.
Toeing the line
As the campaign has progressed, the clearest shift in the CCDI’s investigation notices can be seen in their direct assessments of governance.
In the 2013-17 period, only 23.9 per cent of cases involved allegations of failure to implement central decisions, other governance problems, departures from the “new development philosophy”, abuse of power, and interference in market, judicial and law enforcement activities.
That proportion rose to 53.2 per cent in the period from 2018 to 2022, and hit 73.6 per cent from 2023 to 2025.
These governance issues are now in the disciplinary rules after they were again revised, in 2023. The latest version says officials can be punished for violating political discipline if they express support for central decisions but fail to implement them, carry them out half-heartedly, or dilute or circumvent them.
The rules now also include – under problems with governance performance – any departures from the “new development philosophy” and “high-quality development” as well as wasteful “vanity projects”.


Qian said the sectors targeted by anti-corruption investigators were increasingly connected to the party’s governance priorities. He cited the more intensive scrutiny of financial and banking officials as Beijing sought to guard against “systemic risk”.
“Apparently the central leadership has used anti-corruption as a means to enforce its policy agenda and incentivise the officials’ governance outcomes by targeting specific sectors,” he said.
That view was echoed by Jiangnan Zhu, an associate professor with the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Politics and Public Administration.
“The concept of corruption in the Chinese party-state is broad and dynamic,” Zhu said, adding that it could change with the leadership’s governing priorities.
But she said there had been a consistent theme in the anti-graft campaign from the start: improving governance while strengthening party control.
Path to jobs
Another new focus as the campaign has gathered pace is how cadres are selected for jobs.
Cases involving irregularities in personnel selection and appointments or post-retirement misconduct rose from 39 per cent in the first period (2013-17) to 60 per cent in the latest period (2023-25).
Inspectors are now looking at bribery that has already occurred but also the entry, promotion and exit of cadres. They aim to break corrupt chains formed through money and private networks and to continue supervision once officials have retired.
In Zhu’s book, Bribery as a Third Path to Power? Political Selection in China Beyond Performance and Patronage, she described the buying and selling of public sector jobs as “personnel corruption”.
She wrote that this type of corruption allowed money to replace competence and loyalty in determining who could enter or rise through public office, ultimately causing “the privatisation of public power and deinstitutionalisation of meritocracy”.
Zhu said Xi’s anti-corruption campaign had a focus on the networks formed through the buying and selling of posts because they could develop into power bases beyond the central leadership’s control.
Her research found that explicit cases of buying and selling official positions have fallen sharply since 2017, suggesting the campaign had reduced these activities and helped the party regain control over personnel selection.

Officials’ personal and family lives have also become part of cadre supervision. Across the entire sample analysed by the SCMP, 49.2 per cent of officials were accused of improper family conduct, failing to supervise or educate relatives, or involvement in family-based corruption.
This accountability framework extends a senior official’s responsibility to their family, subordinates and political networks.
Whether a cadre is loyal, reports personal matters truthfully, selects personnel appropriately, keeps family members and those around them under control, and implements central policy can now appear alongside bribery allegations.
But analysts cautioned that this does not point to comprehensive changes to the party-state system.
“I do not see clear evidence that the campaign itself is reshaping the general structure of the party-state bureaucracy,” according to Qian.
He said the campaign had brought large-scale personnel changes, altered promotion standards, performance evaluations and officials’ incentives, and established new institutions intended to tighten control over the bureaucracy.
But he said the broader centralisation of power and strengthening of party leadership could not be attributed entirely to the campaign.
The SCMP analysis also suggests that the party is changing the standards it uses to assess the performance of officials.
That was expressed more directly in a party-wide education campaign on “correct” governance launched by the Central Committee earlier this year.
It identified a number of problems that needed to be corrected, including short-sighted decision-making, falsification, blind expansion and “vanity projects” that waste labour and money.
Assessment of governance must also include the implementation of central decisions and “high-quality development”.
Economic growth and policy outcomes remain important in the evaluation of cadres’ performance. But there is now greater weight given to political loyalty, integrity, control over subordinates and family members, and the ability to carry out central directives.
“As the scope of ‘corruption’ has broadened, some officials would rather choose to ‘lie flat’ and may be reluctant to experiment with policies that could potentially cross the lines drawn by higher authorities,” Qian said.
For Beijing, this means the next phase of the anti-corruption campaign will involve not only continuing to identify problems, but also finding the line between control and encouraging initiative.
“Finding a balance between enforcing discipline and incentivising officials’ performance and innovation remains an important task for the central leadership,” Qian said.


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Wider campaign is now increasingly about how officials use their power, whether they toe the line, and what they do in their private lives


Wider campaign is now increasingly about how officials use their power, whether they toe the line, and what they do in their private lives.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Wider campaign is now increasingly about how officials use their power, whether they toe the line, and what they do in their private lives

Wider campaign is now increasingly about how officials use their power, whether they toe the line, and what they do in their private lives