At the end of April, the National People’s Congress (NPC) of China, the facade Parliament of the communist dictatorship, announced the expulsion of four of its members on suspicion of “violation of law and discipline”. One of those expelled was scientist Yang Xiaoming, creator of the first vaccine against Covid-19 approved in the Asian country.
It was just one of the most recent cases of the anti-corruption offensive undertaken by the Communist Party of China (CCP) since dictator Xi Jinping took over as general secretary of the party in November 2012, and then as leader of the country in March 2012. next year.
As the majority of Chinese in prominent positions are from the CCP, the purges increasingly cover more sectors of Chinese society and economy, such as banks, military (including the Chinese rocket program), health, telephone, energy and technology – always following a mysterious pattern of sudden disappearances, which includes deleting records of the targeted person from the websites of the agencies where they worked.
Politico compared Xi’s anti-corruption offensive to the methods of paranoid Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose purges in the Great Terror between 1936 and 1938 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (some estimates put more than 1 million victims). executed or who lost their lives in prison camps (so-called gulags), many of them former allies in the communist leadership.
In the first ten years of the Chinese campaign, 4.7 million CCP members were investigated. In 2023 alone, around 610,000 members of the party were convicted of corruption.
Analysts consider that there is indeed a lot of corruption in the CCP, but that Xi’s endless offensive also has political motivations, with the aim of consolidating power and preventing other leaders from threatening to dethrone him.
“Xi may be paranoid about high-level corruption, but his fear is not delusional,” Andrew Wedeman, coordinator of China studies at Georgia State University, said in an interview with the BBC. “The corruption he fears is certainly real. [Mas]
It is probably also true, of course, that Xi capitalized on the repression for political advantage.”
In March 2023, he was “re-elected” (a term used here ironically, as China is a one-party dictatorship) for a third five-year term, making him the Asian country’s most powerful leader since the tyrant Mao Zedong.
The dictator has already signaled that the anti-corruption campaign has no end date. “Although there was a landslide victory in the decade-long anti-corruption effort, the situation remains complex,” Xi declared in January. “Faced with such a complex situation, there can be no interruption, relaxation or compromise in the fight against corruption.”
Speaking to CNN, Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, agreed that the repression will not end anytime soon.
“Xi mentions some urgent issues, such as very deep corruption in the economy. It’s for an internal audience, to make sure people know that the anti-corruption campaign is the top priority,” he said.
However, in the BBC interview, Andrew Wedeman highlighted that a seemingly endless offensive, instead of impressing the population, tends to make them more skeptical about its effectiveness.
“Put simply: if you spend a decade fighting a ‘life and death’ battle against tigers [termo que a ditadura
chinesa usa para se referir aos corruptos de alto escalão] and ten years later you are hunting the same amount as when you started, this strongly suggests that you are not managing to hunt them to extinction and may not have even significantly reduced their numbers,” said the professor.
In other words: the political strength of Xi’s witch hunt may have its days numbered. (With EFE Agency)
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