[MUSIC] Part of Xi Jinping's efforts to keep China in Market Leninism and maintain the system as it is, is a very effective Anti-Corruption Campaign. Now, Xi had always worried about the crusty issues of corruption. We now know that back in 2004, he made this major policy address about the problems of corruption. And he now, after coming into power in 2012, this has really been part of his mandate, part of what we think the older leaders asked him to do. And that's why he's been able to carry out this program quite extensively. Now he's doing it for two reasons, one is to save the CCP from the, in a sense, a traditional threat. Corruption has brought down dynasties and so that's often seen that corruption is a terrible risk to any ruling group or any ruling regime in China. And the second is, that he's using the Anti-Corruption Campaign to defeat people who would, interests, who would fight against the reforms that he's trying to promote. How extensive is this program? Well, for the first time, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee was arrested for corruption. This is a man named Zhou Yongkang, and he's arrested two former members of the Military Affairs Committee, which is quite remarkable. And overall, he has arrested a significant number, 48 officials, at the provincial level or above. And here is a table based on Procuraterial Work Reports to the National People's Congress. And we can see that in terms of sort of the big players, these are people who are at the Province or Ministry level and above. He's increased the number, 2014, he took down 28 of them. That's really quite remarkable. At the District or Bureau level, the numbers have gone up by almost 200%. At the County and Department level, which is again lower, we still see an increase of 48%. And what they call Flies. These are sort of the lower level corrupt officials. But still, for the population, those lower level corrupt officials are very important. Because those are the people that the average person will come into contact with and that's who's ripping them off. So we can see that the number of people each year is actually quite remarkable, and it has risen 25%. Now, another key component of the anti-corruption program is to reform the Central Disciplinary Inspection Committee. And in the past, the local Discipline Inspection Committees reported just like the judges before to the horizontal territory,territorial party committee. So, if they were often investigating someone in the party committee at that level, they were then sending the report directly to the people who they were investigating. So that may explain why under Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, the anti-corruption campaign did not go very far. Right? But since the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Party Congress, the local committees of the Central Discipline Inspection Committee, the local Central Discipline Inspection Committee, are now reporting both to the territorial party committee and to their direct superiors in the CDIC. So the CDIC will now know the content. If someone at the territorial level is being investigated, they can keep track and make sure that there is progress in that investigation and they can also hire lower level DIC people. And that will enhance the information flow up to them because those people will be dependent upon them for their jobs. People at the lower level will want to report up to them. And show them the progress that they're doing, and the result as I showed you in the previous table is a much more effective, much more effective anti-corruption campaign. One other thing that Xi Jinping has done, which pulls into this whole idea of anti-corruption and linking together the anti-corruption campaign and his reform program, is that he has really been taking on what we call vested interests. And we saw the emergence of these vested interests in the 2000s during the rule of Hu Jintao, who really lacked the authority to challenge them. And these vested interests include state owned enterprises, the energy sector, security forces, the People's Liberation Army, and even the coal mine owners out in Shanxi were closely linked to the provincial government, and they had a link all the way into the central committee and the presidential office. And so, Xi, to push these reforms, has decided to take on almost all of these groups. He took on the petroleum faction, which had emerged from an oil field called the Shengli Oil Field back in the 1980s. This group of about 40 men had come out of that field, moved up within the administrative hierarchy and then spread out and expanded their control over wide sectors of the state. So the purge, for example, of the head of SASAC, the assets committee, the former head of the public security, the provincial leaders in Szechuan province and some of the SOE sector. These are all related to taking on these vested interests. The PLA was selling the two guys on the military affairs commission who were arrested. They had been selling posts in the PLA and had been making a lot of money from it and that kind of behavior now, Xi Jinping is trying to bring to an end.
