His purge of the top brass is part of a wider campaign
After securing an unprecedented third term as Communist Party chief in October 2022, Xi Jinping led senior officials on a pilgrimage to the party’s “red holy city”. His choice of destination was Yan’an in north-western China, where Mao Zedong’s guerrillas were once based. It was a clue to Mr Xi’s priorities for the years ahead. He told his entourage that Yan’an was where the party had forged its fighting spirit and committed itself to the “correct political direction”.
Source: https://www.economist.com/china/2026/01/28/xi-jinping-is-immensely-powerful-why-cant-he-stamp-out-corruption
不敢腐、不能腐、不想腐 bù gǎn fǔ, bùnéng fǔ, bùxiǎng fǔ: although more than often underestimated, Xi Jinping’s Leitmotiv throughout his tenure, “not daring to be corrupt, not being able to be corrupt, and not wanting to be corrupt”, resulted reportedly, in 2025 alone, in over 1m people to be investigated for corruption and 983K to be punished ; between April and June 2025, a monthly average of 7’271 people or 242 per day were disciplined. Yet the hydra’s head always re-grow. Although too often shrugged off by foreigners, corruption in China is not a merely domestic affair however. Foreigner need not being actively involved for suffering the consequences. Even passive involvement, where the foreign party may not even be aware of the existence of a corrupt element in the investment or transaction to which it is part, may have serious consequences. Chinese law distinguishes institutional corruption from commercial bribery, which may overlap however. The regulation of institutional corruption has been strengthened as of 2018 by the enactment of the Supervision Law and the creation of the powerful National Supervisory Commission (NSC). Commercial bribery mainly falls under the Anti-unfair Competition Law. Both qualifying behaviors may result in sanctions ranging from criminal to administrative penalties, generally much stiffer than in western jurisdictions. What is less known is that innocent parties, including foreigners, may also suffer civil consequences, i.e., the invalidation of the investment or transaction they are a party to, as expressly provided, notably, in several instances by the 2020 Civil Code. In such cases, the authors’ liability proves, more often than not, being of little recourse for compensating the victim. Such parties are, therefore, advised to conduct a thorough due diligence of their counterpart and of the investment or transaction’s subject matter. Such inquiry typically scrutinizes potentially improper relationships such as family links which, unlike, e.g., in Swiss law, are expressly acknowledged by Chinese law.