The Chinese Communist Party’s new round of cleansing actions continues to expand. Three insiders revealed to the Epoch Times that since last year, the CCP has been conducting a nationwide large-scale investigation of officials’ properties and political tendencies through the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), in preparation for the personnel deployment at the 21st National Congress scheduled for next year. The CCDI and the Supervision Commission system have become one of the busiest institutions within the CCP system.
According to an official in the CCP’s bureaucracy, Ren Tao (pseudonym), next year’s 21st National Congress is approaching, and the significant personnel changes reported recently are part of the arrangement for the high-level officials next year. The authorities are attempting to lay out their plans through these actions.
Ren Tao stated that the CCDI and the Supervision Commission are “two cards with one set of personnel.” They are currently cracking down on corrupt officials at the grassroots level to uncover the upper-level connections: “With the 21st National Congress held next year, Xi Jinping’s personnel deployment needs to start at the grassroots level, which is the easiest to break through. Recently, people are arrested every day. Friends at the procuratorate said that they have never dealt with so many cases at once.”
In recent months, the CCDI website of the CCP has published news of officials being investigated almost every day. Reports of officials being investigated have been prevalent in sectors such as finance, energy, tobacco, healthcare, and public security. There is a tense atmosphere in some local official circles, with most grassroots officials becoming more cautious in signing documents, fearing accountability from above.
Ren Tao disclosed the establishment of remote detention centers in various places, and some guesthouses are turned into temporary case-handling locations: “Whenever the inspection team arrives at a place, they receive a large amount of material for reports, including reports from civil servants, the public, spouses, siblings, etc. Cases that could not be detected before, such as owning properties in Japan or Australia that no one knew about, were exposed due to reports from external sources.”
Another insider within the system, Mr. Ma, stated that this large-scale investigation actually began last year and involved cases of officials at the provincial and ministerial levels in the fields of finance, public security, state-owned enterprises, and finance, far exceeding the total number from the past decade.
According to the official report on April 23, in the first quarter of this year, the CCP’s disciplinary and supervisory agencies have brought 245,000 cases to light and disciplined 183,000 individuals, including 56 provincial and ministerial-level officials. The numbers include 30 provincial and ministerial-level officials, 1,267 bureau-level officials, 10,000 county-level officials, and 33,000 township-level officials, with 23,000 current or former village party secretaries and village committee directors being investigated.
Ma commented, “In the first three months of this year, 30 provincial and ministerial-level officials were investigated, with 56 people being disciplined. Almost 90 cases have been made public, and there are still some not disclosed. When it comes to officials below the bureau level, at the township level, there are tens of thousands of people. If the judicial process for prosecution is completed, it will take at least five to six years to finish. Now the authorities are setting a threshold for prosecution. For example, if the embezzlement is below 3 million, just return the money, be expelled from the party, and you are off the hook.”
On April 10, the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the CCP issued the “Interpretation II on the Handling of Criminal Cases of Bribery and Corruption,” raising the threshold for the crime of “huge unexplained property sources” from 300,000 to 3 million yuan. Under the new regulations, public officials with property and expenditures significantly exceeding their legal income, and unable to explain the source, reaching an excess of 3 million yuan, will be subject to criminal prosecution. The previous threshold for prosecution was 300,000 yuan.
According to Ma, last year, the central inspection team and the disciplinary system began to focus on investigating the property and networking relationships of provincial and ministerial levels of officials. After January this year, the investigation extended to county-level, section-level officials, and after February, even village party secretaries and village directors were included in the investigation scope.
He gave an example, saying, “In just one impoverished county in Gansu, over 300 grassroots officials implicated in corruption were identified. Considering there are nearly 3,000 counties nationwide, most of which are not poverty-stricken, one can estimate how many corrupt officials could be uncovered nationwide.”
The external observers are monitoring the CCP’s current high-pressure anti-corruption campaign, wondering if there are other purposes besides confiscating illicit funds. Huang Xiaogang (pseudonym), a scholar from Guizhou, stated to reporters that this high-pressure anti-corruption campaign signifies the CCP’s attempt to thoroughly cleanse the entire bureaucratic system, with an expected completion of a large-scale reorganisation by the end of this year or the first half of next year.
He remarked, “From the top leaders to the third-tier officials, in our county alone, not less than dozens of people have been implicated. Now, when investigating ten people, nine of them have issues. Later on, they had no choice but to broaden the screening criteria.”
Huang Xiaogang believed that the current round of high-pressure cleansing by the CCP is related to the personnel arrangement before the 21st National Congress next year. Beijing is trying to reorganise the local official circles and various systems of interest networks before the 21st National Congress, completing power reshuffles and political alignments ahead of time.
He noted that the recent large number of officials being sacked in the financial, public security, state-owned enterprises, and local financial systems is not merely about tackling corruption but also a clear signal from Xi Jinping about adopting a new style of governance.