Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of China.
Highlights this week: Another Chinese Member of the Politburo is facing an official investigation, Taiwan’s opposition leader visiting China, and a Chinese researcher dies in suspicious circumstances at an American university.
Xi’s Purge Goals Politburo Member
Ma Xingrui, a former aviation technology expert and Xinjiang party secretary, is under official investigation. corruption charges. That makes him the third member of the current Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to fall during the ouster of President Xi Jinping, along with the first civilian member.
There are two possible reasons for Ma’s targeting. The first is that Ma had a unique ability. He handled sensitive political tasks in Xinjiang and early in Guangdong and the city of Shenzhen with skill and ruthlessness. Like me he noted in last week’s China Briefing, Xi tends to find that kind of talent and prospect threatening.
Second, it is possible that Ma background Chinese space agency leaders linked him to corruption being investigated within the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. However, Ma left the aerospace industry in 2013, before the Second Artillery Corps was reorganized into the Rocket Corps and received the funding and authority that enabled the corruption.
Ma’s time in Xinjiang undoubtedly provided opportunities for massive corruption, from the expropriation of the Uyghur. property and business to the notoriously corrupt military organization that runs much of the region’s industry, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
Whatever the reason, Ma now finds herself facing a brutal process of interrogation and punishment, and her past affords her little protection.
What happens once a cleanup target like Ma is formally investigated? Before 2018, the first step was shanghai-technically illegal but normal a practice of secret detention in which suspects were held in isolated areas, often returned to hotels or luxury homes, and brutally interrogated.
The current system used to hold leaders, liuzhiwas established under the National Management Act of 2018 as an official replacement for shuanggui. But in practice, the difference is small: Detention is reduced to six months, and now interviews are held temporarily. wide web of secret equipment. (The process remains separate from the normal justice system.)
Unlike ordinary prisoners, prisoners in liuzhi have no legal representation or outside contact, and physical and psychological torture is common. The goal is not to establish guilt—detention itself implies that—but to obtain confessions, connect networks, and testify against others. It is a political process as much as a legal one.
There is some irony in the case of Ma. As the Party Secretary of Xinjiang, he he managed systems of detention and torture for many people. However as a senior officer, he is unlikely to face physical torture himself. That’s a big difference from Mao Zedong’s era, when the elites were refined like that Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi they were repeatedly tortured, following the patterns in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The relatively restrained actions of high-ranking officials who fell today are the result of compromises reached under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, part of a broader effort to break away from Maoist political extremism. These unwritten rules will benefit Ma when she enters the formal justice system, which could be six to 18 months from now.
Although officials accused of gross corruption usually receive death sentences, these are almost always given as “capital punishment plus relief.” Technically, this means that if they commit another crime in the two years after the sentence, they can be hanged, but that never happens.
The exact length of the sentence remains unclear: the CCP refrains from announcing the releases. But I have heard from retired officials and family members of ousted officers that a decade sentence is common, except in the most sensitive cases.
Once convicted, former officers usually serve their time relatively well advanced cells in Qincheng Prison, near Beijing. (As a Soviet-era joke goes, when leaders are debating whether to build a new school or a new prison, someone asks, “Comrades, who here expects to go back to school?”)
One reason the CCP may allow leniency is that it uses the families of fallen officers as a way to ensure that they do not cause problems when they are released. Part of the post-Mao deal appears to be allowing these families to retain some assets—enough to keep them from speaking out but not enough to buy influence.
Even as Xi continues to fight corruption through the CCP and the military, he seems to be allowing these unofficial rivers to remain in place. If they were removed, however, China’s high-level politics would become more complicated — and the chance of an anti-Xi movement would increase accordingly.
What we’re after
Kuomintang leader in Beijing. Cheng Li-wun, leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), it has arrived in Beijing on Tuesday ahead of a possible meeting with Xi. If it goes ahead, it will mark the first high-level cooperation between the KMT and the CCP in a decade.
The KMT maintains closer ties to China than Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which often accuses the KMT of acting as a conduit for Chinese interests. That he knew the intimacy has it cost the KMT politically in recent years, public distrust of Beijing has grown.
There is a strategic dimension to Taiwan here: The more China believes it can somehow achieve political reunification, the less inclined it may be to accept the risks of invasion.
A suspicious death on an American university. Chinese diplomats attract attention until the death of Danhao Wang, a researcher at the University of Michigan who died on the campus at the end of March following allegations of questioning by law enforcement agencies of the United States government about his work with the university. University police said they are investigating Wang’s death as “a possible act of self-harm.”
During US President Donald Trump’s first term, the China Initiative—a controversial counter-intelligence program—overwhelmingly targeted ethnic Chinese scientists and highly regarded failure. In his second term, Trump’s focus has shifted to perceived domestic enemies, but it is possible that such foreign-targeting efforts are on the rise again.
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Technology and Business
Energy conservation. China is the weather closure of the Strait of Hormuz better than most of Asiadespite relying on energy imports from the Gulf. The main reason is Beijing’s decade-long effort to reduce areas of foreign dependence—something the Trump administration discovered last year as it sought leverage after China’s threats to key mineral supplies.
For example, China was once dependent on imports jet fuelbut the increase in domestic production in the 2010s turned it into a export sales. Although the current crisis has caused export restrictionshas not threatened domestic supply. The insecurity exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the chaotic business environment of Trump’s first term accelerated this push for independence.
Anti-slander campaigns. Following the arrest in January of Chen Zhi, a prominent Chinese-born businessman who lived in Cambodia, China is intensifying its campaign against his company Prince Group, which is already facing US and UK sanctions for running scam centers and cryptocurrency schemes. Last week, Cambodia was sent home Li Xiongone of Chen’s messengers.
Soon Guardian investigation revealed that the activities of the Prince Group extend beyond Cambodia. This raises concerns for the region because China’s approach to organized crime in Southeast Asia tends to be two-pronged: It is aggressive when its citizens are targeted but often collaborates with criminal groups for intelligence purposes.
