China Briefing | As Shaanxi saga shows, even Xi hits China’s bureaucratic brick wall
- A scandal over illegal villas suggests even China’s most powerful leader since Mao struggles with a bureaucracy that has spent centuries ignoring its leaders
- After all, “the sky is high and the emperor is far away”
The mandarins may cower in his presence and sing his praises publicly, but many of them continue to obfuscate and frustrate Xi’s policy agenda and specific directives.
His apparent frustrations and anger came to a head this month when China Central Television aired an unusual investigative report in which high-level incumbent, sacked and jailed officials in the northwestern province of Shaanxi were paraded to detail how they had repeatedly obfuscated and fobbed off Xi’s specific directives on probing the illegal construction of luxury villas in the ecologically fragile Qinling mountains – five times over a span of about four years, to be exact. The saga was finally laid to rest in July when Xi dispatched a central government task force of anti-graft investigators to probe the blatantly lethargic reactions to his directives, resulting in a large number of senior officials being demoted or detained on charges of corruption.
The airing of the documentary was followed by the annual meeting of China’s top anti-graft investigators in which Xi declared “a sweeping victory” in the fight against corruption and effectively declared war on official lethargy.
At the meeting, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – the top anti-graft watchdog – identified fighting “the practice of formalities for formalities’ sake and bureaucratism” as one of its top priorities for the new year.