Top tigers fall in Xi’s endless purge

(Edited and refined by Candice Chan and Grace Chong, with the assistance of AI translation.)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has just marked its 105th anniversary, continues to press ahead with its anti-corruption campaign, vowing to stamp out “all viruses that erode the party’s health”.

In the first half of 2026, the CCP’s top disciplinary watchdog announced investigations into 36 centrally managed cadres (generally vice-ministerial rank or above). This matched the figure for the same period two years ago, was slightly higher than last year, and involved higher-ranking officials.

A year of high-profile falls

Publicly available information shows that the highest-ranking official to fall was Politburo member Ma Xingrui. Seven others held full ministerial rank: former Inner Mongolia party secretary Sun Shaocheng, Minister of Emergency Management Wang Xiangxi, former Zhejiang party secretary Yi Lianhong, Chongqing mayor Hu Henghua, former Hubei governor Wang Xiaodong, Xu Liuping, party secretary of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, and Wei Xiaodong, chairman of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

Among them were several veteran provincial party secretaries and the mayor of a centrally administered municipality. By comparison, only eight full ministerial-level officials were announced to have fallen throughout the whole of 2025, underscoring the intensity of this year’s anti-corruption drive. It is also worth noting that Sun Shaocheng, Yi Lianhong and Wang Xiaodong had all stepped back into less prominent roles after leaving frontline leadership positions, yet were still put under retrospective investigations into misconduct committed years earlier.

Media analyses have also found that, of the 36 centrally managed cadres investigated in the first half of the year, a relatively large number hailed from Shandong and Hunan provinces. Six, including Ma Xingrui, Sun Shaocheng and Guangdong Provincial CPPCC vice-chairman Guo Yonghang, who once served as Ma Xingrui’s principal aide, are natives of Shandong. Yi Lianhong, Hu Henghua and Zhou Liang, vice-chairman of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, who spent many years working at the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), are from Hunan.

By age, seven of the 36 officials were born in the 1970s, including He Zhiliang who fell in June and became the first senior official from the Central Social Work Department to be brought down since its establishment, Shanghai deputy mayor Chen Yujian, and Zhou Liang. This suggests that officials in this age cohort may face a particularly high risk of disciplinary investigation.

Continued anti-corruption efforts

That said, given the sheer size and diversity of China’s officialdom, it would be inappropriate to conclude that these individuals are connected simply because they share similar places of origin or age profiles. If there is one defining feature of the officials brought down in the first half of this year, it is the sheer number involved, the wide range of positions they occupied, and the prevalence of retrospective investigations into past misconduct.

In fact, the CCP has maintained a high-pressure anti-corruption campaign since 2023. According to the latest report by Caixin, the number of centrally managed cadres investigated in the first half of each year since the 20th Party Congress in 2022 stood at 25 in 2023, 36 in 2024, 32 in 2025 and 36 this year. With the exception of 2023, more than 30 centrally managed cadres were brought down in the first half of each of those years.

The reasons behind this are easy to infer. Following the leadership reshuffle at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, officials exhibiting obvious “symptoms” of misconduct would, in theory, already have been weeded out in an initial round of scrutiny. Yet not long into 2023, the authorities continued to uncover glaring disciplinary violations among senior officials, including the extensive corruption scandal involving the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. A fresh wave of anti-corruption investigations was promptly launched, signalling that the campaign would continue unabated.

Some commentators have observed that, over the past three to four years, the CCP has experienced a second major anti-corruption peak following the thunderous campaign that unfolded during the first three years after the 18th Party Congress in 2012. The number of senior officials brought down in this latest wave has formed another peak, surpassing the first one that followed the 18th Party Congress.

The real scale of the purge

Notably, the 36 centrally managed cadres whose investigations were announced in the first half of this year do not represent the full scale of the anti-corruption campaign. This is because investigations into centrally managed cadres are not always disclosed publicly.

Nor do the CCDI’s announcements include military personnel. Senior military figures such as former Central Military Commission vice-chairman Zhang Youxia and Central Military Commission member Liu Zhenli, whose downfalls were announced earlier this year, were investigated by the Central Military Commission’s Discipline Inspection Commission rather than the CCDI. Factoring in senior military officers would push the annual total of high-ranking officials brought down even higher.

The campaign reaches every level

The crackdown extends well beyond high-ranking “tigers”. China’s disciplinary authorities have also shown little leniency towards lower- and mid-ranking officials.

According to monthly figures released by the CCDI and the National Commission of Supervision, authorities investigated 24,513 cases involving violations of the eight-point regulation in May alone, with 20,012 individuals receiving party disciplinary or administrative sanctions. The overwhelming majority were officials below departmental level. Both figures have remained in the five-digit range throughout this year and are significantly higher than those recorded in 2024.

The Chinese leadership’s sustained anti-corruption drive, coupled with its rigorous enforcement of the eight-point regulation, has long fuelled debate over the campaign’s unintended consequences. One concern is that the increasingly stringent political climate has encouraged officials at all levels — particularly those in the lower and middle ranks — to “lie flat”, becoming reluctant or unable to take initiative.

Meanwhile, successive waves of anti-corruption investigations have failed to stem the problem. One corrupt official is replaced by another, while the number of senior officials brought down continues to climb. It is a pattern that is both troubling and perplexing.

No end in sight

Critics argue that China’s lack of independent oversight, combined with its campaign-style approach to anti-corruption, makes it unlikely to resolve its deeply entrenched corruption problem.

For the Chinese leadership, however, there is little doubt about the campaign’s legitimacy. Beyond improving bureaucratic integrity and effectiveness, it also serves as a powerful instrument for securing political loyalty.

In his speech marking the CCP’s 105th anniversary on 1 July, General Secretary Xi Jinping identified the Party’s emphasis on “constant self-improvement” as one of its defining strengths. That suggests the current high-pressure anti-corruption campaign is unlikely to follow the trajectory of the previous round, which wound down after three years of intense activity ahead of the leadership transition.

Instead, the Party appears more determined than ever to build a “clean” corps of officials. From the leadership’s perspective, the campaign cannot be judged a failure so long as the fight continues. By that logic, China’s hard-line anti-corruption drive is likely to continue for the long term.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “中共将把高压反腐持续下去”.

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