The investigators descend on government agencies and corporate boardrooms. They interrogate powerful officials and frequently rebuke them for lacking zeal. Most of all, they demand unflinching loyalty to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
They are the inspectors from the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), and the humbling displays they have recently orchestrated in many of China’s most influential government agencies and largest corporations are the most prominent sign of their expanding authority.
Best known as the country’s anti-corruption agency, the commission has lately assumed a growing role as political inquisitor, investigating the loyalty and commitment of cadres to Xi and his agenda, while cementing the commission’s role as his chief political enforcer.
Illustration: Mountain People
“It is not just anti-corruption, but more powerfully about central control,” said Jeremy Wallace, a political scientist at Cornell University who studies Chinese politics.
Xi will press his demands for top-down obedience at an annual meeting of the CCP’s Central Committee in Beijing that began on Monday. The committee is expected to issue new rules for “comprehensive and strict management” of the party, especially its top ranks, giving the commission even more leverage to police and punish officials.
The move reflects Xi’s ambitions and fears as he prepares for a second five-year term as national leader, and has confirmed the rise of the commission and its formidable secretary, Wang Qishan (王歧山), a long-time ally of Xi now seen by many as the second-most powerful official in China.
However, nothing has illustrated the new order as bluntly as the commission’s intimidating inspections, which the commission calls “political health checks.” They have scrutinized prominent agencies like the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Chinese Ministry of Finance, the CCP’s Department of Propaganda and the nation’s biggest state companies.
The commission’s investigators have shown a taste for chastening displays of power in what has become a ritual of rebuke and repentance.
For instance, at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s headquarters in Beijing this month, hundreds of officers were marched into a cavernous auditorium to listen to investigators excoriate senior ministry officials for lacking “political judgement” and demand greater loyalty to Xi and the party.
Then their boss, Chinese Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun (郭聲琨), rose to offer contrition, vowing to make his officers “even more steadfastly and conscientiously” obedient to Xi and other party leaders.
“Loyalty to the party is the top political imperative,” he said.
Wang has pointedly said to officials that under his commission, “being red-faced and sweating will be the norm.”
Another notable target was the CCP’s Propaganda Department, which the commission censured in June, saying that it “lacked vigor” and that “the political awareness of some leading officials has not been high.”
The criticism of such a powerful arm of the party fueled speculation of a factional rift at the top of Xi’s government. However, dozens of other party and government agencies have faced similar reprimands.
The commission has even taken a role in enforcing Xi’s economic policies, including efforts to cut back gluts of coal, steel and other industrial products.
However, the core of its work is about loyalty to the party and its top leadership, referred to as the party center.
“The entire party must safeguard the authority of the party center,” Xi said in remarks featured recently on the commission’s Web site.
“There can absolutely be no outwardly shouting that you are in lockstep with the party center while actually you are not really paying attention,” he said.
Underlying the push for stricter loyalty is fear, the leadership’s nagging nightmare of the party crumbling in a Soviet-style collapse.
“Rebuilding a disciplined hierarchical party organization is about avoiding the collapse Xi and other leaders observed in the Soviet Union,” said Melanie Manion, a political scientist at Duke University.
“I think Xi views the stakes for China as very high, but the stakes for Xi as a leader are also high,” she added.
The campaign appears to be timed to reinforce Xi’s grip on power as the Central Committee is about to set plans in motion to give him another five-year term as party leader.
Some officials have been publicly swearing to uphold his “absolute authority.”
“Resolutely defend General Secretary Xi Jinping as the leading core of the party’s center,” Tianjin party secretary Li Hongzhong (李鴻忠) said at a meeting to respond to criticism of the city by discipline commission inspectors.
“Resolutely defend the absolute authority of the leading core,” he said.
For Xi, the commission has proved a versatile mechanism for fighting corruption, with its ancillary ability to take down or intimidate potential political opponents, and now to enforce loyalty.
Wang is a trusted friend Xi has known since the 1960s, when the two were sent as youths to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
The commission has long had the power to secretly detain officials without court approval, a contentious and feared tool.
However, past leaders lacked the authority to take on the corruption and abuses that have flourished since the economic liberalization of the 1990s.
Wang, with Xi’s backing, has freed the commission of organizational shackles that once allowed local officials to stymie it, and he has taken to the task with enthusiasm.
“The challenge that worries us most comes from within, from within the People’s Republic of China and from within our own party,” he said in a closed-door speech to his inspectors last year that was leaked on the Internet.
Wang told them that the pressure would not let up.
“I have said there will be no end to this, because if there is a backlash, there will be big problems,” Wang said.
The dual missions go hand in hand. Xi and Wang see corruption as a symptom of a breakdown of control in the party that also spawned disloyal cliques, resistance to policies and disillusionment.
They worry that those undercurrents could undermine Xi and his plans to revive the party’s power.
On a practical level, the anti-corruption campaign has deprived thousands of local officials of illicit income, eliciting discontent that the loyalty campaign aims to eradicate.
“The anti-corruption campaign has created a lot of resentment and disincentives among public officials,” Li Ling (李玲), a lecturer at the University of Vienna who has studied the commission, said in an e-mail.
“Political discipline is to repress that resentment and to recreate an incentive for public service,” Li Ling added.
So far there have been no signs of public backlash to the campaign.
However, there are fears that it risks undermining Xi’s efforts to rejuvenate the economy.
As the commission has taken a role in enforcing economic policies, censuring state-controlled companies and banks, foreign investors have become worried about the effects on their Chinese business partners and clients.
The number of Chinese corporations under investigation by the commission grew to at least 60 last year, from six in 2013, said James Zimmerman, the chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce in China.
US businesses should not tolerate corruption, he said, but “we are very much concerned about the expanding scope and uncertain duration of CCDI investigations, which appears to have extended nationwide and to practically every sector of the economy.”
More broadly, the centralization of power, incessant inspections and demands for conformity have sapped the morale of government officials, experts and investors said.
China’s past spurts of economic rejuvenation often came from letting officials take risks, but the relentless pressure for loyalty to the top has instilled caution.
Even the state-run news media and some supporters of Xi have begun to obliquely acknowledge that the pressure on the officials is taking a toll.
“Since last year, our politics have become very anxiety-ridden, and President Xi is facing passive resistance across the country,” said Jin Canrong (金燦榮), a political scientist at Renmin University in Beijing.
“There is widespread inaction from local elites and local governments,” he said. “Nobody opposes, but nobody does anything.”
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