Zhou Yongkang
China’s ruling Communist Party announced an investigation into a feared ex-security chief yesterday demonstrating President Xi Jinping’s grip on power and breaking a longstanding taboo against publicly targeting the country’s topmost leaders.
The party’s anti-graft watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said on its website that it is investigating Zhou Yongkang for serious violations of party discipline, but gave no details. Such an announcement typically paves the way for the official to be ousted from the party and face prosecution.
Until his retirement in 2012, Zhou was one of nine leaders in the party’s ruling inner circle — the Politburo Standing Committee — whose incumbent and retired members had been considered off-limits for prosecution in an unwritten rule aimed at preserving party unity.
However, Xi, the party leader and president, has vowed to target both low- and high-level officials in his campaign to purge the party of corruption and other wrongdoing that has undermined its legitimacy in the public eye.
The announcement is a “powerful demonstration” that Xi and his graft-fighting right-hand man, fellow Standing Committee member Wang Qishan, are “really in control,” said Ding Xueliang, an expert on Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“This is a huge, huge success for them. It is really remarkable,” Ding said. “For the broadly-defined party state system, which has many millions of members, now they have to face the new reality. That is: You are not immune to punishment.”
By targeting Zhou, who had commanded China’s massive domestic security apparatus before his retirement, Xi demonstrates the considerable power he has amassed since he took the helm of the party in November 2012. By dismantling Zhou’s spheres of influence, Xi also has freed up important positions in strategic areas of the government, security apparatus and state enterprises that he can fill with his own allies.
The announcement ended months of speculation over Zhou’s fate that had built up as several high-ranking officials and businesspeople and dozens of other known associates came under investigation. One after another, they disappeared into the custody of party investigators, foreshadowing the problems that lay ahead for Zhou.
Zhou was perceived as being somewhat untouchable, with expansive patronage networks covering the sprawling southwestern province of Sichuan where he had once been party boss, the state oil sector, as well as the police and courts.
More significantly, as China’s security chief, he oversaw the country’s domestic spy agencies, a position that afforded him access to information on other high-ranking politicians who might pose a threat to him.
In order to launch an investigation into Zhou, Xi would likely have had to overcome opposition from high-level party officials and retired leaders concerned about how it would hurt the party’s image. By breaking the unwritten rule of not targeting leaders of that level, the move against Zhou also raises the questions of whether more top leaders will be implicated.
Xi has made his drive to clean up the party the hallmark of his leadership. The crackdown has felled at least 30 provincial and ministerial officials and more than 50 executives of state companies since Xi took charge — the biggest purge of its kind in decades.
Among them, those believed linked to Zhou’s case included the former chairman of China’s largest energy company, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., a deputy general manager there, a provincial deputy party boss, provincial deputy governor and deputy public security minister. AP
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