Xi’s anti-graft drive a success, claims book

BEIJING : President Xi Jinping’s high-profile anti-graft campaign has scored an “overwhelming victory” and a large number of Chinese now believe corruption levels are down in the country, says a new government-sanctioned policy book.

The book concludes that despite the success of the sixyear-old campaign, the momentum of the anti-corruption drive is not slowing down but picking up pace. Xi launched the campaign soon after taking over as the general secretary of the Communist Party of China in 2012-13.

Hundreds of thousands of Communist Party cadres and officials have since been punished. Several high-profile leaders have been swiftly investigated and removed from their powerful posts, which has led critics to say the corruption was – and possibly continues to be – a weapon in Xi’s hand to tackle intra-party rivals and consolidate his grip on power. While launching the campaign, Xi had famously said the Communist Party will go after “high-ranking tigers to lower-level flies” in China. Among the big tigers netted were top political leaders such as Zhou Yongkang, former security czar, and Bo Xilai, who at one point was expected to be part of the top leadership of the Communist Party.

From the military, Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, both former vice-chairpersons of the Central Military Commission, were punished.

Beijing carried out such operations as Sky Net and Fox Hunt to hunt down officials accused of graft who had fled abroad.

The campaign has seemingly polished the Communist Party’s image among the people though it is doubtful whether it is to the extent claimed by the “Blue Book of Combating Corruption and Upholding Integrity”, compiled by the China Anti-corruption Research Centre of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“The overall trend of the anticorruption campaign is getting better and better,” Jiang Laiyong, the book’s executive editor, told state-run China Daily newspaper.