China’s high-level anti-corruption drive continues.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), China’s top political discipline and anti-corruption body, has reportedly placed a senior inspector under investigation.
According to the South China Morning Post, discipline chief Li Gang is under surveillance as part of the investigation. Li was appointed by the CCDI to the Central Organisation Department, the Communist Party’s top human resources office.
The CCDI announced on Monday that Li was under ‘disciplinary review and surveillance investigation’ for ‘suspected serious violations of discipline and law’.
In the past two weeks, three other senior officials have been placed under investigation on similar charges.
They are Cao Xingxin, deputy general manager of state-owned telecoms giant China Unicom, Sun Yuning, deputy director of the General Administration of Customs, and Du Yubo, former vice-minister of education.
According to a count by the South China Morning Post, 44 senior cadres were placed under investigation in the first nine months of this year, up from 34 in the same period last year.
The CCDI said 45 senior officials were investigated last year. This is the highest number since Xi launched his sweeping anti-corruption campaign in 2013, in which he vowed to go after both ‘tigers’ and ‘flies’ – powerful leaders and lower-level bureaucrats.
Two more were added to the 2023 total in June, when the Politburo announced that former defence ministers Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe had also been placed under investigation last year.
All the detained Tigers belonged to a pool of what the CCDI calls ‘centrally directed cadres’, officials with the rank of vice-minister or above.
A smaller number held slightly lower ranks but occupied key positions in critical sectors.
Li, 59, a vice-minister, is the highest-ranking disciplinary chief to be dismissed this year after Long Fei, the disciplinary chief of the state-owned China Southern Power Grid.
Long was placed under investigation in February and expelled from the Party in August for serious violations of Party discipline and laws.
Addressing the CCDI’s general assembly in January, Xi urged the top discipline watchdog to ‘regularly weed out rotten apples’ as the fight against corruption remained ‘serious and complex’ after more than a decade.
Xi said the CCDI should ‘resolutely prevent and crack down on wrongdoing’ to strengthen the building of its discipline inspection and supervision team and become a ‘model of self-reform’.
