Mike Baker

Tax Relief Advocates.

Real solutions for real people.

Welcome back to the PDB.

We're getting a rare look behind the curtain at Xi Jinping's latest effort to tighten his grip on China's Communist Party, the CCP.

For more than a decade, Xi has described his anti-corruption campaign as a necessary effort to clean up the party, punish crooked officials, and restore public confidence in the Chinese state.

Huzzah!

But new reporting from the Wall Street Journal suggests the campaign has evolved into something much broader, a sweeping political purge aimed not only at corruption, but also at enforcing loyalty, ideological discipline, personal obedience and conformity to Xi's vision for China.

Imagine that happening in a communist system.

Who would have thought?

According to the Journal, Communist Party enforcers punished nearly 1 million people in 2025 alone.

It's a rather staggering figure, the highest number on record, and more than five times the number reported when Xi first took power back in 2012.

Those punishments can range from formal reprimands and demotions to expulsion from the CCP and criminal prosecution.

The Journal reviewed disciplinary statements by the party's internal watchdog involving more than 940 officials punished under Xi from 2013 through this May and found that the definition of unacceptable behavior has, and this won't surprise you, been steadily expanding.

Early in Xi's rule, for example, officials were typically punished for familiar offenses such as bribery, embezzlement, misuse of public funds, and other forms of corruption.

Today, however, the charges often extend far beyond financial wrongdoing into policing areas like general lifestyle, family values, personal conduct, and, of course, enforcing political obedience.

In other words, Xi is increasingly dropping all pretense of moderation, exposing the realities of his totalitarian control.

Officials have increasingly been accused of political disloyalty, failing to carry out Beijing's directives, resisting party policies, or forming factions and cliques that could challenge central authority.

That shift became particularly visible after the 2014 purge of Zhou Yongkan, a former security chief and one of the most powerful figures ever brought down by Xi's anti-corruption campaign.

He was expelled from the party and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

While corruption charges played a role, party investigators also accused Sho of violating what they called political discipline and engaging in disloyalty to the party, language that would become increasingly common in the years that followed.