anti-corruption campaign

An anti-corruption campaign is a coordinated programme by which a state attacks bribery, embezzlement, abuse of office, and patronage networks through investigation, prosecution, and disciplinary action. In the Chinese context — the focus of modern-history syllabi — the term denotes the campaign launched by Xi Jinping after the 18th Party Congress in November 2012, captured in his pledge to fight both "tigers" (senior officials) and "flies" (low-ranking cadres). It rests institutionally on the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), then headed by Wang Qishan, which operated the extra-judicial detention system known as shuanggui ("double designation"). The campaign was codified and expanded by the March 2018 constitutional amendment that created the National Supervisory Commission (NSC) under the Supervision Law, replacing shuanggui with a statutory detention measure called liuzhi.

The campaign's mechanism combines Party discipline with state law. The CCDI handles members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under intra-Party rules; serious cases are transferred to the procuratorate for criminal prosecution. The NSC, ranked above the State Council and answerable to the National People's Congress, extends supervision to all public-office holders, not only Party members. Critics, including human-rights bodies, note the absence of judicial review, restricted access to counsel during liuzhi, and the campaign's selective deployment as a tool of intra-elite power consolidation — sidelining rivals while entrenching the leadership core. Anti-corruption drives are not unique to China: India operates through the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 and the Central Vigilance Commission and Lokpal (established under the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013), while other states use independent commissions such as Hong Kong's ICAC.

Named "tigers" felled in China include former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang (sentenced to life imprisonment in 2015), former military vice-chairmen Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, and senior official Bo Xilai (life, 2013). By 2026 the campaign remains a permanent feature of governance rather than a finite drive; Xi has repeatedly declared it "always on the road" (yongyuan zai lushang), with continuing purges in the financial sector and the People's Liberation Association of Rocket Force, signalling that elite discipline and loyalty enforcement persist as instruments of centralised control.

For the exam, the topic appears in China modern-history and contemporary-politics papers and in comparative-governance sections of UPSC GS-II and the FSOT. Typical question angles ask candidates to assess whether the campaign represents genuine governance reform or factional power-consolidation; to identify the institutional shift from CCDI shuanggui to NSC liuzhi after 2018; and to compare China's centralised model with India's Lokpal-CVC framework or Hong Kong's ICAC. Strong answers cite dated instances (the Zhou Yongkang conviction, the 2018 Supervision Law) and weigh transparency and rule-of-law concerns against measurable deterrence, distinguishing rule by law from rule of law.