Xi's anti-corruption drive punished 983,000 people last year alone

The machinery of President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign has swollen to industrial scale, with Chinese agencies punishing 983,000 people last year alone—and the number of senior officials brought down in 2024 was triple the figure recorded when the drive began in 2013.

What skeptics once dismissed as "just a gust of wind" has metastasized into one of the Communist Party's core governing instruments, wielded not only to purge graft but to enforce party discipline and steer economic strategy. A new data analysis by the South China Morning Post confirms the campaign has widened steadily since its launch, penetrating every tier of the bureaucracy and uncovering fresh categories of corruption that now include cryptocurrency schemes and clandestine proxy networks.

Provincial governments bear the brunt

Regional administrations have absorbed the heaviest blows. Sixty percent of senior officials toppled between 2013 and 2025 were serving in provincial or local governments, with resource-rich provinces—Jiangxi, Liaoning, Shanxi, Hebei, and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region—recording the highest tallies of dismissals. The punishments span a wide spectrum, from mild warnings to full criminal prosecutions.

From Zhou Yongkang to a permanent apparatus

Early doubts about the campaign's durability ran so deep that Wang Qishan, then the party's top anti-corruption chief, publicly warned local governments against reverting to temporary "movement-style" crackdowns. By that point, Beijing had already jailed dozens of senior officials, including Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee—China's highest political body—who was one of the country's most influential politicians before his 2013 downfall.

Zhou's spectacular fall signaled that no rank offered immunity, yet authorities still felt compelled to reassure the public that the drive would not peter out. A decade on, the scale and persistence of the crackdown have silenced those doubts. What began as a headline-grabbing purge of "tigers and flies" has evolved into a permanent enforcement architecture that now shapes how officials behave, how resources are allocated, and how party control is maintained across China's vast bureaucracy.

Source: South China Morning Post