Xi Jinping’s Anti-Corruption Drive Seen as a Strategy for Power and Survival: Report

The detention of Liu Jianchao, a China's most prominent diplomat and director of the Communist Party's International Liaison Department, is an indication of how President Xi Jinping's broad anti-corruption campaign has evolved into a means of tightening political control, a recent report said.

Liu's detention—long considered a frontrunner to become China's next foreign minister—earlier this month shook Beijing's diplomatic and political establishments.

"Liu was more than another veteran cadre. He was a man deeply enmeshed in the Communist Party's disciplinary machinery, having presided over the international affairs of the anti-corruption campaign, including the showpiece Operation Fox Hunt that hunted down fugitives overseas. His sudden tumble from greatness, together with the temporary disappearance of his deputy Sun Haiyan, is more than a political misstep. It is a telling juncture at which Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crusade has become a tool for political survival and domination," Sri Lanka's Daily Mirror noted.

The newspaper noted that Xi’s anti-corruption purge has steadily expanded into areas once thought untouchable—including the military, technology giants, and now the diplomatic establishment.

"Foreign policy has always been a sensitive domain in Beijing, but the Foreign Ministry has historically enjoyed a degree of insulation from the most disruptive aspects of Party purges. The targeting of Liu Jianchao disrupts that tradition. His detention, coming after the still-unexplained disappearance of former foreign minister Qin Gang in 2023, suggests that the Party sees diplomacy not as a neutral domain of statecraft but as an arena that requires continual ideological policing," the report stated in an article titled ‘Xi’s anti-corruption drive hits foreign policy lite with Liu Jianchao’s detention’.

A "polished diplomat" with an Oxford education and tasked with healing Beijing's frayed relations with Washington and Europe, Liu was also an insider with the Party, previously counted on to head anti-graft drives abroad. The irony, the report notes, is that a man who assisted in tracking corrupt officials abroad has now fallen victim to the very system he assisted in maintaining.

"His arrest highlights that anti-corruption is no longer so much about eliminating graft but increasingly about policing loyalty. If even such stalwarts of the anti-graft drive can be eliminated, then no official can feel insulated on the strength of previous service or institutional position. The message is of course intentional from the supremo himself; political compliance rather than technical ability, is the coin of survival under Xi," the paper emphasized.

The analysis also contended that the campaign has long since moved past its original mission to combat corruption, evolving instead into a mode of governance based on unpredictability, terror, and individual allegiance to Xi.

"Critics also suggest that the anti-corruption campaign risks destabilizing the Party by undermining faith among its elites. But precisely the opposite; instability among elites is what Xi's consolidation of power needs. An elite system where nobody feels safe is one where everyone is motivated to show loyalty at all times and in public. By keeping even high-ranking diplomats uncertain of their destiny, Xi guarantees that his own power supersedes institutional norms," concluded the Daily Mirror.