Anti-corruption & party discipline
The institutional architecture of China's anti-corruption campaign and Party discipline system: the CCDI, NSC, Supervision Law, and the Eight-Point Regulation.
The dual track: Party discipline and state supervision
The People's Republic of China operates anti-corruption enforcement on two interlocking tracks. The first is Party discipline (党纪), administered by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI, 中央纪律检查委员会), established in 1949, abolished during the Cultural Revolution, and restored by the 11th Party Congress in December 1978. The CCDI enforces the Party Constitution and the Regulations on Disciplinary Actions of the Communist Party of China, last comprehensively revised in 2018 and again amended effective 1 January 2024. Its sanctions ladder runs: warning (警告), serious warning (严重警告), removal from Party post (撤销党内职务), probation within the Party (留党察看), and expulsion (开除党籍).
The second track is state supervision (监察), exercised since 2018 by the National Supervisory Commission (NSC, 国家监察委员会). The NSC was created by the constitutional amendment of 11 March 2018, which inserted a new Section VII into Chapter Three of the PRC Constitution (Articles 123–127), establishing supervisory commissions as a fourth branch of state power alongside administrative, judicial, and procuratorial organs. Its enabling statute is the Supervision Law of the PRC, adopted by the National People's Congress on 20 March 2018 and amended in 2024.
Merger of Party and state organs
The defining structural feature is that the CCDI and the NSC operate as one institution with two nameplates (合署办公), sharing offices and a single leadership. This fuses the Party's disciplinary reach over its roughly 99 million members with the state's supervisory jurisdiction over all public officials exercising public power—including non-Party civil servants, managers of state-owned enterprises, and personnel in public hospitals and universities, who previously fell outside both procuratorate and CCDI control.
The NSC replaced the anti-corruption functions previously dispersed across the Ministry of Supervision, the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention, and the anti-graft bureaus of the Supreme People's Procuratorate. Its most controversial power is liuzhi (留置, retention in custody) under Article 22 of the Supervision Law, which authorizes detention of up to six months (three months, extendable once by three) and replaced the extralegal Party measure shuanggui (双规). Liuzhi was placed on a statutory footing precisely to answer criticism that shuanggui operated outside the criminal procedure framework, though detainees still lack guaranteed access to counsel during the investigative phase.
Upon completing an investigation, the supervisory commission transfers cases involving suspected crimes to the procuratorate for prosecution. Disciplinary and supervisory action thus precedes, and is distinct from, criminal liability—an official may face Party expulsion, removal from public office (the supervisory sanction), and a separate criminal trial for bribery under Articles 383–386 of the PRC Criminal Law. Candidates must retain this sequencing: discipline and supervision first, prosecution second.
