An anti-corruption campaign initiated by China’s president netted its most notable target Thursday when a judge sentenced the country’s former domestic security chief to life in prison for accepting bribes and abusing his power. But the harsh sentence only added to questions about whether Xi Jinping’s nearly three-year-old crackdown is aimed at stemming wrongdoing among China’s vast bureaucracy or consolidating his power.
Zhou Yongkang, 73, was formally sentenced Thursday after a secret trial held May 22. A retired senior Communist Party official, he is the highest ranking politician to be jailed on corruption charges in the people’s republic in decades. The development follows the 2013 sentencing of another party official, Bo Xilai, an ally of Zhou’s who was also found guilty of corruption and sentenced to life in prison.
Beyond the high-ranking officials, tens of thousands of government bureaucrats have been targeted since Xi announced in 2012, shortly after he took over the reins of the Communist Party, that he planned a sweeping crackdown against rampant and institutionalized corruption he said threatened to lead to the “downfall of the state.”
But the televised sentencing Thursday of a man once as powerful and feared as Zhou sends a larger message.
“There’s an intimidation factor when you go after really big fish like that. It sends a chill across the whole system and puts everybody on notice,” says Robert Manning, senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council of Zhou’s sentencing. “[It] suggests not just that corruption is endemic in China, but Xi doesn’t feel he’s consolidated power enough.”
Some see the campaign against corruption as reminiscent of an old-style party purge, in which leaders expelled or arrested those seen as disloyal or undesirable. But Xi’s efforts have wide support in China.
“All the polling suggests that the anti-corruption campaign is very popular with the average Chinese,” Manning says. “Corruption — village officials abusing power and so on — has been one of the major gripes in tens of thousands of protests and demonstrations that occur every year all around China.”
Indeed, a 2014 Pew Research Center survey found 54 percent of Chinese said corrupt leaders are a very big problem.
The crackdown helps Xi convince the Chinese that he’s capable of delivering on his promises to push through needed economic reforms. The government body in charge of the campaign, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, reported in February that 414,000 officials have been disciplined for corruption since Xi took office. Of those, 201,600 have been prosecuted in court.
“The perception is, I think, that the Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign already achieved [success],” says Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “That’s where Xi Jinping’s popularity comes from.”
Yet despite the numbers, questions remain about the larger effectiveness of the campaign. Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index suggested China last year was more corrupt than the previous year, its score falling from 40 to 36 out of 100 on a scale in which zero is “perceived to be very corrupt.” China was among the countries with the biggest falls from the previous year despite the crackdown.
“You have to see this in this larger context,” Manning says. “Xi has a very radical reform agenda that steps on a lot of toes of vested interests, and so what he’s doing is part of a larger strategy to pare down resistance to some of these reforms which they’ve only just begun. The anti-corruption campaign is also a way of whittling down real and perspective opposition to the reforms.”
Li says the corruption trial and Thursday’s sentencing of a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee — the body of 25 officials who run the party — is a very significant step for the government in tackling the issue.
“Even former [members] previously were usually protected by their position,” Li says. “That itself is a breakthrough.”
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China’s Corruption Crackdown: Progress or Politics? originally appeared on usnews.com
