How China’s anti-corruption fight became Xi Jinping’s most important policy

The South China Morning Post has launched a major data project diving into President Xi Jinping’s signature anti-graft campaign. In the first part of a series accompanying the data project, Phoebe Zhang looks at how the campaign became one of the Communist Party’s most important policies.

In the early years of President Xi Jinping’s first term, when graft fighters were taking down senior officials in ways that raised eyebrows, Chinese authorities constantly had to remind the public that the anti-corruption campaign was not “just a gust of wind”.

At that point, Beijing had already locked up dozens of senior officials, including Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, the highest echelon in China’s political hierarchy. Before his downfall in 2013, Zhou had been one of China’s most influential politicians.

Concerns were so widespread that the anti-corruption push would be a flash in the pan, especially at the local level, that Wang Qishan, then the party’s top anti-corruption chief, warned that local governments might fall back on temporary “movement-style” crackdowns.

A decade later, few need convincing as the anti-corruption fight expands, netting record numbers of senior officials and unearthing new types of graft involving cryptocurrency schemes and clandestine proxies.

A new analysis by the South China Morning Post found that the campaign has widened since its inception. Last year, anti-corruption agencies handed down punishments to 983,000 people, with the fallout ranging from mild warnings to investigations and criminal prosecution. The number of senior officials taken down last year was three times that of 2013.

The SCMP’s data bank project also found that from 2013 to 2025, 60 per cent of senior officials felled by China’s anti-corruption drive were serving in regional governments. The campaign has hit provincial administrations particularly hard, with resource-rich areas – notably Jiangxi, Liaoning, Shanxi and Hebei provinces, as well as Inner Mongolia, autonomous region – recording the highest number of dismissals.