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ABSTRACT
The anti-corruption drive launched by General Secretary Xi Jinping in late 2012, early 2013 has been criticized as a political purge designed to weed out Xi's would-be rivals within the communist party leadership rather than a genuine attack of corruption. In this article, I use the historical precedent of the purges launched in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin to define what constitutes a purge and what distinguishes a purge from a political witch hunt. I then examine Xi's anti-corruption campaign, arguing that while a small part of the campaign may be a politically motivated attack on his rivals, the primary focus of the drive has been against the much larger problem of corruption within the party, state, and business sector.
Keywords: China, Anti-corruption Drive, Xi Jinping, Purge, Witch-hunt
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Introduction1
From the very beginning of Xi Jinping's drive against corrupt tigers (senior officials) and flies (rank and file officials) in late 2012, early 2013, skeptics have questioned whether his drive was a sincere effort to combat corruption or a cover for a political purge of his political rivals. Lam, for example, asked whether what he saw as a Maoist, Cultural Revolution-style "rectification campaign (MA)," was really "a foil for old-style intra-Party power struggles."2 Brown argued that if Xi presses the fight forward after bringing down former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, the most senior official charged with a crime since the Gang of Four in the early days of the Deng Xiaoping era, there was a risk that the Chinese public would "view the whole anti-corruption campaign as something very much like a political purge."3 In an interview with Bloomberg, Brown described the campaign as "a sort of modern witch hunt" which was "about allegiance and faith."4 In that same article, Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology, described its goal as "weakening 'politics by elders,'" and reducing the lingering influence of retired Chinese Communist Party General Secretaries Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.5 Zheng and Chen have described it as a "ruthless anti-corruption purge."6
The press has been less restrained. In July 2014, a headline in Bloomberg labeled Xi's attack on Zhou Yongkang a "power play."7 Aljazeera branded it "China's great purge" -...