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ABSTRACT
Right after Xi Jinping took office as China's new leader in 2012, he kicked off the largest and most comprehensive anticorruption campaign in the history of the People's Republic of China. Thousands of corrupt officials have been punished including a few members of the powerful politburo. Scholars around the world have made many valuable arguments on Xi's anticorruption campaign. But almost all of them have centered their studies on Xi's anticorruption campaign or contemporary China. This paper will place Xi's campaign in a historical backdrop and draw a comparison between Xi's campaign and similar anticorruption campaign under three notable rulers in the Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties. This paper argues that, while Xi's anticorruption campaign is comparable in many aspects to precedence in the dynasties, they have significant differences. The success and failure of dynastic anticorruption campaigns may provide readers with a better perspective in both understanding the nature and anticipating the likely outcome of Xi's ongoing anticorruption campaign.
Keywords: Xi's Anticorruption campaign, current scholar views, historical precedence
XI'S ANTICORRUPTION CAMPAIGN
Before Xi Jinping, son of former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, took power in late 2012, he had largely been little known to the West, which was in stark contrast to the flamboyant Bo Xilai, the Party Secretary of Chongqing, who had led a rather populist movement of "Singing the Red [Songs] and Striking the Black [mafia]." However, shortly after Xi Jinping was made the most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 1 he quickly embarked on an anticorruption campaign whose scope and scale are both unprecedented in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
The whole episode began in February 2012 with a surprising attempt of Wang Lijun, chief of Chongqing Public Security Bureau, to seek political asylum at the United States Consulate in Chengdu, Sichuan province. As a longtime faithful protégé of Bo Xilai, Wang had played a key role in Bo's high-profiled campaign ostensibly against corrupt officials and local mafia. But a dispute over an alleged murder of an English businessman by Bo's wife led to a fatal struggle between the two men. 2 The sudden incident of Wang Lijun offered Xi Jinpin excellent ammunition to attack Bo Xilai, a more popular and ambitious competitor...