Revenge nightmare
PRESIDENT Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive rolls on and on. When it began, many saw it as a merely symbolic clean-up which would end once a few relatively unimportant heads had rolled. But now it’s clear that it is more than that: Xi has gone farther than any Chinese Communist leader since the party seized power in 1949.
By authorising the investigation for corruption of Zhou Yongkang, the nation’s former security chief and a long-term member with Xi of the Politburo’s nine-man standing committee – the most powerful body in the land – he has broached new ground. Nobody of Zhou’s stature has been targeted before. Nobody knows what will happen next. Many are beginning to fear for China’s long-term stability.
China’s stratospheric growth has been accompanied by a total collapse in party morality, and corruption is spreading through the system like cancer. Xi is by no means an impartial judge of high-level state corruption. His own relatives have made fortunes amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, and it has been acidly pointed out that no officials close to Xi have suffered in the ongoing purge. Xi has made it clear that he and he alone shall be the final arbiter of who is and who is not corrupt.
The question the Chinese are now asking is how much further the purge can go? By lopping off eminent heads, it is not just the immediate relatives who are upset: the vast networks of inter-dependency on which China’s economic success has been built risk being shattered.
In a hermetic system like China’s, where the judiciary has no independence and the power of the party is eternal, corruption becomes endemic and true justice is a chimera. In the meantime, Xi gathers ever more power into his own hands, and officials – nearly 70 of whom have committed suicide in the past year and a half – tremble with fear of what tomorrow may bring. Far from purifying the system, Xi risks plunging China back into a nightmare of paranoia and revenge not unlike that which prevailed during the Cultural Revolution.