China’s Communist Party is preparing for an important meeting of its top leaders this week, with discipline and party loyalty high on the agenda. The fifth plenum, as the gathering is known, comes against a backdrop of years of purges that have led some analysts to ask whether the drive is really about corruption or about ensuring loyalty to the leadership.
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he pledged to root out corruption throughout the ranks of the Communist Party. More than a decade later, the pace of investigations has not slowed. Last year, China’s disciplinary authorities opened investigations into more than 1 million people, including more than 100 officials at or above ministerial or provincial level.
For those who follow elite Chinese politics closely, concern about an apparent lack of discipline within the party is dominating discussions among officials ahead of the meeting. The scale of the campaign, measured by the number of people targeted and the seniority of some of those investigated, underlines how central the issue has become to the leadership’s agenda.
The plenum is one of the periodic gatherings of the party’s central committee at which major policy and personnel matters are typically discussed. The continuing investigations, however, highlight a tension that observers say has persisted throughout Xi’s time in office: whether the campaign is aimed primarily at graft or whether it also serves to tighten political control by removing officials seen as disloyal.
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