Content area
Full Text
Abstract
A new term, "political corruption," emerged in the Chinese Communist Party discourse during President Xi Jinping's corruption crackdown. To understand why this type of corruption is particularly unacceptable to the Party, I apply Winters's theory of oligarchy to encapsulate a group of Chinese high-level political elites who leveraged their political power for massive material wealth through corrupt measures. I argue that these oligarchs had to defend both wealth and political power in the context of the single-party authoritarian regime. Their intent and capacity for the double defense, however, can pose a threat to the regime and pave the way to their downfall. Two high-profile cases further show how different career tracks provide power resources politicians can use to ascend to the level of oligarchs. This research draws attention to concept adaptation in corruption crackdowns in China and enriches oligarchical theory by signifying the logic of double defense for using political power as the steppingstone to oligarchic power.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
After Xi Jinping rose to power in the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he launched a widespread corruption crackdown immediately. It has had an unusually long duration and large number of investigations, and it has attacked many high-ranking officials known as "tigers."1 A new term that emerged in this gigantic corruption crackdown is "political corruption" (... zhengzhi fubai). It first formally appeared in an article by Wang Qishan (...), then secretary of the Central Disciplinary Inspection Commission (CDIC) in 2016,2 and was frequently mentioned afterward in formal party-state meetings and by the national major newspapers such as People's Daily until it gradually disappeared from the public lexicon around mid-2018 (Figure 1).
Distinct from the generic concept of corruption that refers to officials' abuse of power for personal interests, political corruption refers to a particular type of misbehavior of concern to the CCP. According to Wang Qishan,3
Political corruption is the worst type of corruption (... zuida de fubai), which includes forming interest groups (liyi jituan) in an attempt to steal the power of the Party and the state, engaging in factionalism (... zongpai zhuyi) and mountaintop-ism (... shantou zhuyi), and participating in activities lacking imprimatur of organizational leadership, thereby undermining the centralized leadership of the Party.