The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) — the highest internal-control institution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — closed its second plenary session and issued a communique on January 13. In the communique, the CCDI mapped out its priorities for this year.
The top priority, the communique said, is to “resolutely get rid of disloyal, dishonest and Janus-faced people” and “purify the Party in an all-round way.”
China’s state news agency Xinhua explained that the so-called “Janus-faced” members are those who are “disloyal and dishonest to the Party, who comply in pubic but oppose in private.”
In fact, in recent months, multiple Chinese former high officials, who have been brought down under the anti-corruption campaign launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping, have been accused by the authorities of being “Janus-faced” or “double faced.” For example, as The Diplomat noted earlier, Xinhua announced in late November last year that Zhang Yang, a former member of Chinese Central Military Commission (CMC) — the highest body that oversees the Chinese military — “hanged himself at home.” Then, the military’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, published a commentary on Zhang’s death, referring to Zhang as a “typical double-faced man,” because Zhang “shouted his loyalty in appearance and committed corruption” behind the scenes. Notably, the article used the pseudonym of “Jun Zheng Ping,” which actually stands for “the commentary of Political Work Department.”
In addition, the communique declared that the CCDI’s fight against corruption “will particularly target those officials who have shown no restraint and continued their wrongdoing” after the 18th CCP Congress held in late 2012.
“We will continue to see that there are no no-go zones, no stone is left unturned, and no tolerance is shown for corruption,” the communique said. “We will focus on those corrupt cases involving the interest groups that are engaged in both political issues and economic issues.”
It’s worth mentioning it was at the 18th CCP Congress that Xi, who also holds the position of general secretary of the CCP Central Committee, came into power and launched the far-reaching anti-corruption campaign.
In the communique, the CCDI also vowed to safeguard “Xi Jinping as the core of the CCP Central Committee and the whole Party” and “the authority of the Central Committee and its centralized, unified leadership.”
Under this logic, those Party members who are disloyal and dishonest to Xi personally can be condemned — if the CCDI wants to — as being disloyal to the Party as a whole.
So far, many China observers have pointed out Xi’s hidden political agenda behind the anti-corruption campaign. Earlier in 2014, for example, Reuters claimed by quoting sources that Xi used “a purge of senior officials suspected of corruption to put his own men into key positions across the Communist Party, the government and the military.”