China’s anti-graft campaign nets 1.34 million ‘flies’ in five years

President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign has punished about 1.34 million "flies" since it began nearly five years ago, a sign the ruling Communist Party is strengthening its control at grassroots level, officials said.

Mr Xi is gearing up for a twice-a-decade party congress this month at which he is expected to tighten his grip on power and reshuffle the leadership. One of the core elements of his policy since he came to power in 2012 has been the anti-corruption campaign, aimed at stamping out graft by lower-level cadres, or “flies”, as well as the “tigers” at the top of the 87-million-strong organisation.

The government officials punished were working at the town, township or lower level and included 648,000 village officials, the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in a report, cited by the official Xinhua news agency.

Among the “tigers”, there have been probes into more than 70,000 officials at or above the county level for corruption since 2012, the CCDI said.

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The campaign has apparently proven popular in China where there is widespread exasperation at corrupt cadres. Although there is no independent mechanism for evaluating its popularity, Xinhua quoted a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics showing that 93 per cent of Chinese people were satisfied with the anti-corruption effort in 2016, 18 percentage points higher than in 2012.

Probably the most notorious of the scalps claimed by the campaign is Bo Xilai, once seen as a potential leadership candidate who vied for power with Mr Xi and premier Li Keqiang. The former commerce minister, and party boss in Dalian and Chongqing, was jailed in 2013 on corruption charges, after his wife Gu Kailai was convicted of complicity in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.

Tough on its own

An equally senior victim was Zhou Yongkang, formerly security supremo and a member of the party's ruling standing committee. Others included Ling Jihua, former aide to Hu Jintao, whose son died in a Ferrari crash, and recently Mr Bo's successor, Sun Zhengcai, has also fallen foul of the anti-graft campaign.

In August, Mo Jiancheng, head of the anti-corruption committee at the finance ministry, came under investigation for graft. The CDDI has been eager to show that it is just as tough on its own members as on other cadres.

Two former vice-chairmen of the main armed forces command run by Mr Xi, the Central Military Commission, were investigated for corruption. Guo Boxiong was jailed for life while Xu Caihou died of cancer while in custody.

The CCDI said 155,000 country-level party offices have set up corruption monitoring systems by the end of August, which makes up 94.8 per cent of all such bureaux.

The next stage of the anti-corruption campaign is to target officials who have fled overseas using the “Sky Net” dragnet. By the end of August, 3,339 fugitives had been captured in more than 90 countries and regions, 628 of them former officials, Xinhua reported.