Xi targets petty corruption on a giant scale to soothe China’s masses

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is battling petty corruption through a nationwide campaign that has swept up more than half a million low-level officials over the past year, as Beijing grapples with rising public resentment over a sagging economy.

Communist Party enforcers are targeting grassroots graft from kickbacks for public contracts to bribes for medical treatment in a renewal of Xi’s popular assault on corrupt “flies" and “ants"—low-level bureaucrats and state workers—whose misconduct affects ordinary citizens. Such energetic enforcement is pushing Xi’s war on corruption to new levels of intensity, more than a decade after he launched it to burnish his image as a man of the people and secure the party’s grip on power.

Since Xi became leader in 2012, party inspectors have disciplined more than 6.2 million people for offenses ranging from corruption to bureaucratic inaction. The latest campaign is part of China’s response to social reverberations from broad economic challenges—including a real-estate slump and high rates of youth unemployment—that have sapped consumer confidence, stoked unrest and fueled grumbling over Xi’s stewardship of the world’s second-largest economy.

“Punish the ‘greed and corruption of flies and ants,’ and give the masses a greater sense of fulfillment," Xi said early last year as he ordered the party’s top disciplinary body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, to curb grassroots graft. Party inspectors proceeded to root out what they call “unhealthy tendencies and corruption issues that occur close to the masses." Authorities punished 530,000 people and sent 16,000 of them to prosecutors for criminal proceedings in 2024.These probes drove up