From He Weidong and Zhang Youxia to Ma Xingrui: The Political Logic of Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Campaign Has Changed
After nine months of waiting, the Ma Xingrui case has finally landed. On April 3, Chinese authorities announced that Ma Xingrui, a member of the Politburo and deputy head of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, was under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Commission of Supervision for suspected serious violations of discipline and law.
When Ma was transferred out of Xinjiang last July, the official line was only that he had been given “another assignment.” No new post was announced, and no explanation was provided. Looking back now, that long period of suspension was itself a signal. For anyone familiar with the workings of the CCP’s upper ranks, what matters most about the Ma case is not simply that another senior official has fallen. It is that it has finally broken a boundary that had long been faintly visible but never clearly crossed.
At the start of Xi Jinping’s second term, I argued that Xi’s anti-corruption campaign had “three upper limits”: incumbent Politburo members were not to be touched, retired Standing Committee members were not to be touched, and senior princeling officials were not to be touched. The first of those three limits was broken last year, when Vice Chairmen of the Central Military Commission He Weidong and Zhang Youxia were brought down one after the other. Ma is the third member of the current Politburo to get into trouble. If one takes the view that, for Xi Jinping, military power has never been just another form of power but the foundation of his rule itself, then once problems emerge in the military, many boundaries that normally cannot be crossed can be handled as “special cases.” Seen from that angle, the fall of He and Zhang did not in itself mean that the rule against taking down incumbent Politburo members had truly been broken. Ma is different. He is a standard civilian party-state Politburo member, and he held office in the local bureaucracy. His fall shows that this upper limit has in fact been broken.
Now that anti-corruption has advanced to the level of incumbent Politburo members, does this mean Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has become harsher than before?
Many people may read it that way. Perhaps. But judging from the official follow-up statements and the way party media have framed these cases, what really brought them down may not have been corruption as such, but the fact that, politically, they offended Xi’s absolute authority. After He was officially announced last October to have been expelled from the Party and stripped of his military rank, a military commentary accused him of having “seriously undermined the principle that the Party commands the gun and the system of CMC Chairman responsibility.” After Zhang was officially placed under investigation in January this year, military commentary raised the issue further, describing his conduct as having “seriously trampled on and undermined the system of CMC Chairman responsibility” and as involving “political and corruption problems that seriously fostered and affected the Party’s absolute leadership over the military and endangered the Party’s governing foundations.” After Ma’s investigation was announced, both the Xinjiang regional Party committee and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, where he had once served, declared at notification meetings that they would “always put absolute loyalty to the Party first … remain especially clear-headed and especially firm in matters of right and wrong and on issues of political principle, and always maintain a high degree of consistency with the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core in terms of political stance, political direction, political principle, and political path.” This indirectly suggests that Ma’s problem lay in “major questions of right and wrong,” in “political principle.”
It is widely rumored that Ma’s wife gave insurance policies from Hong Kong and other offshore jurisdictions to the wives and children of many leading officials — some worth millions, others worth tens of millions or more. The scale of those allegedly involved, and the breadth of the network, are said to be staggering. If the rumor is true — and in my view, while such claims are usually never confirmed officially, they are not baseless; nine times out of ten they are true — then Ma could not possibly have been unaware of what his wife was doing. By acquiescing in it, he was likely trying to bind many senior leaders’ families to himself, forming an alliance of interests that would serve as a layer of political protection. The main purpose was probably to pave the way for a place on the Politburo Standing Committee at the CCP’s 21st Party Congress by cultivating relationships at the top, though one cannot exclude another calculation as well: that if trouble came, the breadth of the entanglement would make Xi think twice before moving against him.
The 20th Politburo is, by and large, filled with Xi’s own people. Yet even within Xi’s camp there is a distinction between the core and the periphery, and competition among them is intense. Ma belonged to the periphery and is generally regarded as a leading figure in what is known as the Shandong clique. The patron behind the Shandong clique is said to be Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan — she is from Shandong, hence the label “Shandong clique,” also known as the “first lady faction.” In other words, Ma was seen as coming up through the first lady’s route, not through Xi’s innermost personal line. Under ideal circumstances, five new people could enter the Standing Committee at the 21st Party Congress, but there are more than ten serious contenders. For someone like Ma, positioned in the outer circle, improving his odds of entering the Standing Committee required cultivating relationships at the top — and this, of course, is also true of other potential candidates — especially within the Shandong clique. On that logic, the primary recipients of those offshore insurance policies would have been other members of the Shandong clique, as well as those more broadly connected to that circle. Whether Peng herself was involved cannot be verified from the outside. But politically speaking, if such benefit transfers and relationship-binding did occur, she could not have been entirely free of associated responsibility.
Giving away insurance policies may not in itself have violated the law, so long as the money was clean. But it clearly violated the CCP’s political discipline and raises the suspicion of “political networking.” What Xi dislikes most is subordinates engaging in small maneuvers behind his back and forming small groups with the nature of political alliances, even loose ones. In that sense, Ma seems to have committed exactly the kind of offense Xi most abhors. Perhaps that is what the Xinjiang Party committee and the XPCC meant when they hinted in their statements that Ma had not been especially clear-headed or especially firm on “major questions of right and wrong” and on “political principle.” That also helps explain why Xi would have found the case difficult to handle, especially if it could implicate even higher levels, or even touch Peng Liyuan. That is precisely why the Ma case took nine months to be announced.
By the ordinary rules of Chinese politics, if a senior official is removed from an important post, disappears from public view for a long time, and multiple former subordinates then begin to fall, the formal announcement of his downfall usually does not take that long. The fact that it dragged on for nine months clearly shows that Xi was repeatedly weighing the political consequences of openly dealing with Ma, trying to find a way to minimize the political impact on all sides, including on himself. Put differently, in Ma’s case, political considerations outweighed corruption. Had Ma’s wife not made those insurance gifts, Xi might well have let him off.
Put the Ma case together with those of He and Zhang, and one sees that Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is undergoing a quiet but important change: it is shifting from “cleaning up corruption” to “blocking alliances.” What increasingly determines whether a senior official will be openly dealt with is not how much he has taken, but whether he has used corruption to build relationship networks, chains of interests, and layers of protection — whether he has woven horizontal ties within the elite that could in some measure slip free of the supreme core’s control. In other words, corruption is only the entry point. Politics is where the matter ends up. It is now the primary consideration in deciding whether a corruption-tainted senior official will be publicly handled, while corruption itself has become secondary. The purpose of this shift in the political logic of anti-corruption is to reshape elite CCP politics. That reshaping includes three elements: first, compressing the elite from a web of interlocking relationships into a power structure that can only attach vertically to the core; second, turning “being one of Xi’s own people” from a relatively stable political identity into a conditional and temporary status — usable, but not necessarily protected; and third, changing the real risk for senior officials from “whether one is corrupt” to “whether one has used corruption to create one’s own protective layer and sphere of influence.”
If Xi wants the elite, and especially his own followers, to understand that the rules of survival have changed — that even attaching oneself to him does not guarantee political safety, and that one can still be dealt with — then the best way is to make an example of one of his own. Among these three cases, Ma’s is more useful than those of He and Zhang. Because of the military background of the latter two, some may still have harbored the illusion that even if they too formed factions, Xi might not necessarily move against them publicly. Ma Xingrui is different. If he is dealt with severely, the shock to Xi’s followers — especially those on the outer edge of his camp — will be far greater. For them, even the protective coloring of Peng Liyuan, even being seen as one of Xi’s own people, is no guarantee of safety. Once one touches what the top leadership finds most intolerable, one can still go down. At that point, Politburo members, Central Committee members, and provincial- and ministerial-level officials alike will understand that the status and rank that once protected them no longer provide real security. And with that, the deterrent effect of taking down Ma will have been achieved.
Of course, in practice, for the sake of preserving stable rule, Xi will not expand the scope of the blow by publicly handling all the senior officials’ family members who may indeed have received benefits from Ma’s family. What he wants is for them to know that he holds leverage over them, that he knows who is horizontally connected to whom behind the scenes. That alone is enough. And in doing so, he automatically expands the structure of deterrence at the top, rewriting the internal configuration of elite politics so that the upper ranks become increasingly atomized, trust one another less, cut one another off earlier, and become less willing to explore tentative alliances.
In the past, many assumed that once one entered a certain level, or entered the circle of “one of our own,” political risk would drop significantly. That logic is now failing. Xi’s followers too will become stratified. The innermost handful may still be secure. Outer-circle followers, by contrast, will increasingly resemble replaceable tools rather than political assets that can expect long-term protection. To ensure their political safety, each person will have to rely ever more on a single line of loyalty to Xi himself, rather than at the same time cultivating networks of interest with other senior figures.
Through anti-corruption, Xi is transforming horizontal elite politics into vertical loyalty; transforming potential mountains and factions into isolated islands; transforming an elite politics that once functioned through factions, networks, and mutual protection into one that can only operate along a single line centered on himself. This will further strengthen his authority. But the cost is that it will make the elite increasingly unable to form meaningful collective governance and will leave top-level politics more rigid and more fragile.
At the moment, this reshaping of elite CCP politics has one clear temporal target: the 21st Party Congress. Before the 21st Party Congress, what Xi most needs is not to arrest a few more corrupt officials, but to ensure that no horizontal alliances emerge spontaneously within the elite, and that no layers of protection or influence networks exist that can bypass him personally. Seen from this angle, He Weidong, Zhang Youxia, and Ma Xingrui are simply the three most conspicuous markers in this round of reshaping. Ma’s case in particular shows that Xi is trying, before the 21st Party Congress, to forge a high-level cadre corps and a politics that maintain only a one-way connection to him personally and are absolutely obedient and loyal to him.
This article has been published online at FP.