China Watch | Why Xi Jinping’s bid to put ‘power in a cage’ must go to the very top
Coming up with clear rules to govern the members of China’s Politburo – and their families – presents the leadership with one of its biggest tests yet
For centuries, when it comes to official corruption, mainlanders have gone by the Chinese proverb that says “if the upper beam is not straight, the lower ones will go aslant”.
The idiom still rings true as President Xi Jinping ( 習近平 ) deepens his unprecedented anti-graft campaign to consolidate his power and shore up the legitimacy of the Communist Party by targeting both “tigers” and “flies” – powerful leaders and lowly bureaucrats. Since the campaign began nearly four years ago, it has netted several thousand officials, including a number of tigers. Zhou Yongkang (周永康), formerly a member of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee and the country’s security tsar, has become the country’s highest ranking leader to fall.
While mainlanders applaud these efforts, they have good reasons to remain sceptical, not the least because most of the top officials who were investigated or jailed had retired from the previous administrations and wielded little actual power. They were sarcastically known as half-dead tigers.
Indeed, as Xi has vowed to put “power in a cage” of regulations, it is mission-critical that there are effective mechanisms to supervise and govern the behaviour and performances of the country’s top echelon of officials. These are the nearly 380 Central Committee members of the party, and particularly the 25 members of the Politburo – out of whom seven members on the Politburo Standing Committee rule supreme.
China's graft-busters train sights on new round of targets
Of the 87 million party members, this small group wields great power and exercises ironclad control over the country from the government to the military to the legislature and law enforcement.