Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign all about political survival and control: Report

Colombo: The recent detention of Liu Jianchao, one of China’s most prominent diplomats and head of the International Liaison Department, is “less about corruption and more about control” as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive has evolved into a mechanism for political survival and control, a report highlighted recently.

The news of Liu Jianchao, widely tipped to be a future foreign minister, being detained earlier this month had sent shock waves in China’s official and diplomatic circles.

“Liu was not just another seasoned cadre. He was a man deeply embedded in the Communist Party’s disciplinary apparatus, having overseen international aspects of the anti-corruption campaign, including the high-profile Operation Fox Hunt that tracked down fugitives abroad. His abrupt fall from grace, alongside the temporary disappearance of his deputy Sun Haiyan, is not simply a political setback. It is a revealing moment in how Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive has evolved into a mechanism for political survival and control,” Sri Lanka’s leading newspaper ‘Daily Mirror’ stated.

The development indicates that Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has now expanded to sectors “once thought relatively insulated” including the military, the technology elite, and now, the foreign policy establishment.

“Foreign policy has always been a sensitive domain in Beijing, but the Foreign Ministry has historically enjoyed a degree of insulation from the most disruptive aspects of Party purges. The targeting of Liu Jianchao disrupts that tradition. His detention, coming after the still-unexplained disappearance of former foreign minister Qin Gang in 2023, suggests that the Party sees diplomacy not as a neutral domain of statecraft but as an arena that requires continual ideological policing,” the Mirror detailed in a report titled ‘Xi’s anti-corruption drive hits foreign policy lite with Liu Jianchao’s detention’.

Calling him a “polished diplomat” who has been educated at Oxford and sought to repair Beijing’s “frayed ties” with the United States and Europe, the newspaper said that Liu was also a CCP insider, trusted enough to lead anti-graft operations abroad. The irony, it says, is that a man who once hunted down corrupt officials abroad now finds himself hunted by the very system he helped build.

“His detention showcases that anti-corruption is no longer primarily about rooting out graft but now is also about policing loyalty. If even those who once embodied the anti-graft crusade can be purged, then no official can feel secure on the basis of past service or institutional role. The signal is of course deliberate from the supremo himself; political obedience not technical competence, is the currency of survival under Xi”.

The anti-corruption campaign, the report asserts, has outgrown its initial justification of cleaning up graft and has become a governance mechanism premised on fear, unpredictability, and personal loyalty to Xi Jinping.

“Critics sometimes argue that the anti-corruption campaign risks destabilising the Party by eroding trust among its elites. But that is precisely the point; instability at the elite level serves Xi’s consolidation of power. A system in which no one feels secure is one in which everyone is incentivized to display loyalty constantly and publicly. By keeping even senior diplomats guessing about their fate, Xi ensures that his personal authority outweighs institutional norms,” the Daily Mirror report emphasised.

IANS