The report released by the Chinese Communist Party’s discipline inspection and supervision system shows that in 2025, over a million cases were filed and nearly a million people were disciplined by the disciplinary and supervisory departments. The targets of the cases ranged from officials at the provincial and ministerial levels down to village-level party members, covering almost the entire administrative and social control system. Compared to 2024, there was a significant increase in the number of cases filed and people disciplined, with a more than 15% increase in the number of cases filed.
According to a report by the official Chinese media Xinhua News Agency on January 17, in 2025, 115 officials at the provincial and ministerial levels were filed, 5,016 officials at the bureau level, 41,000 officials at the county level, 137,000 officials at the township level, and 91,000 current or former village party secretaries and village committee directors. Throughout the year, a total of 983,000 people were disciplined, including 727,000 disciplined for Party discipline violations and 321,000 for administrative discipline violations, with the focus mainly on grassroots cadres as well as other personnel in rural areas and enterprises.
Comparing the data, in 2024, the CCP’s discipline inspection and supervisory organs filed a total of 877,000 cases, disciplining 889,000 people. In 2025, the number of cases filed increased by approximately 135,000, a 15.4% increase, and the number of people disciplined increased by about 94,000, a 10.6% increase. The related figures indicate that the CCP’s punishment scale for so-called “disciplinary” officials continues to grow.
In terms of the distribution of cases filed and disciplines, officials at the provincial and ministerial levels and bureau-level officials consistently account for a low proportion of the overall numbers, with township-level and village-level officials being the main targets of accountability. Official reports state that the cases mainly involve violations of “political discipline,” “integrity discipline,” and issues in grassroots governance.
Chinese historian Wang Ping (pseudonym) told reporters that the data truly reflects not how many high-level officials the CCP has investigated but rather how responsibility within the system is continuously shifted downwards.
He said that the targets of filing and discipline have long focused on grassroots and non-core power groups, indicating that many issues that should have been digested at the institutional level have ultimately been transformed into personal responsibility. “Decisions and rules at the top basically remain unchanged, but when something goes wrong, someone has to step forward to take the blame, and often it is the grassroots officials who end up standing at the forefront.”
Regarding the significant increase in the number of township-level and village-level officials being filed, Mr. Song, a scholar at Peking University (pseudonym), analyzed from the perspective of institutional operation, stating that this does not mean that the grassroots are more prone to corruption but that the grassroots are placed in a position that is difficult to operate properly.
He said that grassroots officials have limited power but directly deal with specific matters such as land transfers, agricultural subsidies, project fund allocation, and grassroots administrative approvals. “The rules are strict, but the space is small, tasks must be completed, and over time, they can be easily dragged into gray areas. Once problems arise, the responsibility naturally falls on them.”
From the discipline data, it can be seen that the number of high-level officials being handled remains limited, and those continuously added to the disciplinary list are mainly village-level officials, general staff, and grassroots groups in rural areas and enterprises. Many analysts believe that this distribution resembles a focused clean-up at the grassroots level rather than truly addressing the core of power accountability. In this process, the grassroots are constantly treated as a “buffer zone” for institutional risks, while the upper-middle-level structures that actually formulate rules and control resource allocation remain in relatively safe positions.
Zhou Jun, a political scholar in Hunan (pseudonym), told reporters that disciplining nearly a million people within a year itself indicates that the entire governance system is in a state of high tension. He pointed out that such a scale has exceeded the scope of normal supervision and more resembles a ruling method that relies on punishment to maintain operation. “When a system needs to continually discipline grassroots personnel to keep daily operations running, it indicates that the authorities find it increasingly difficult to repair problems through regular mechanisms.”
Some opinions believe that disciplining nearly a million people within a year reflects that the CCP’s daily governance and internal supervision mechanisms have difficulty digesting long-term accumulated institutional contradictions and can only rely on a high-intensity discipline and punishment system to operate. While the CCP interprets the related data as the achievement of “comprehensively strengthening Party governance,” overseas media and some researchers see it more as an annual list revealing the internal pressure and governance dilemmas of the CCP system, with its effects continuing to manifest.