China’s anti-graft campaign has entered a new phase, ensuring that delegates, who will bring about a once-in-five-years leadership change later this year, are free from corruption.
A communiqué released on Sunday at the end of a three-day meeting of the powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) highlighted that a “strong intra-party political environment” is required ahead of the 19th CPC National Congress to be held this year.
China will undergo a major leadership shake-up during the 19th party congress. The change of guard, the foremost event on China’s domestic political calendar in 2017, will lead to the emergence of a new standing committee of the Polit Bureau — the country’s most powerful decision-making body — on President Xi Jinping’s watch.
Highest ant-graft forum
The CCDI is the top anti-corruption, and rule enforcement organ of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Since the vast majority of officials belong to the CPC, the CCDI is China’s highest de facto anti-corruption body.
“The CCDI conference that has just concluded is a major benchmark. There is an implicit recognition here that the three-year anti-graft campaign has reversed the tide of corruption. So the next phase has begun of ensuring that ‘clean people’ occupy decision making bodies,” says Roger Wu, a Beijing based political analyst, in a conversation with The Hindu .
“Corruption effectively contained”
In his remarks during the conference, Mr. Xi under-crossed the momentum-shift against corruption had been achieved. “The spread of corruption has been effectively contained and the battle against corruption has gained crushing momentum,” Xinhua quoted Mr. Xi as saying.
Mr. Wu stressed that the widely held perception that Mr. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has essentially been a cover for an internal purge against potential rivals, was an over-simplification. “The CPC had been inflicted with serious corruption for many years. Its legitimacy was on line had not Mr. Xi and Wang Qishan [the CCDI head] not carried out the anti-corruption campaign,” he observed.
National supervisory panel
The conference also decided to establish a national supervisory commission as part of an effort to reform the state supervisory system.
The new body is expected to draw from the experience of three pilot projects that have been launched last month at the provincial levels on supervision reforms. In an article in Sixth Tone**, a website affiliated with the state-funded Shanghai United Media Group, Li Yongzhong, a former vice president of the CCDI think-tank, observed that the experiment that is being carried out in the three provinces is meant to shift the power of supervision from the internal mechanisms within the CPC, to a separate supervisory body accountable to the local legislative systems.
All for reforming the system
Mr. Li stressed that the new initiative was in tune with reforming a system that had borrowed too much from the former Soviet Union. He added that China needed to dig into its roots, for prior to the formation the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the country had a tradition of external-supervision, which could be traced as far back as the Qin dynasty. “The founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 broke that long-standing tradition, making the party responsible for monitoring the behaviour of its own officials and thereby relegating such oversight to a subordinate role in state affairs,” he observed.
