(TibetanReview.net, Feb24’19) – The principal objective of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the highest internal-control institution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is to safeguard the leadership position of President Xi Jinping while its anti-corruption programme is the most potent tool to carrying out this objective, noted a commentary posted on the thediplomat.com website Feb 23, citing a recent declaration by the CCDI itself.
Both the CCDI and the all-powerful National Supervisory Commission (NSC) — the newly established organ designed to oversee all public servants and presided over by President Xi himself — are CCP’s political organs.
The commentary noted that at its third plenary session in Beijing on Jan 11, Xi, cited by Xinhua, had repeated demands that all officials — particularly senior officials — must follow the “double safeguards” and that the CCDI must take the lead.
And the so-called “double safeguards” meant “to resolutely safeguard Xi’s status as the core of the CCP Central Committee and the whole Party, and to resolutely safeguard the authority and leadership of the CCP Central Committee” — a sentence added into the CCP Disciplinary Regulations in 2018.
Thus, what Xi said at the session was actually asking all officials to safeguard his own status, noted the commentary by Charlotte Gao.
The Xinhua report was stated to have cited Xi as having also stressed that an “iron army” of disciplinary inspection and supervision officials who are “loyal, clean and have strong sense of responsibility” must be built and, at the same time, the “bad apples” must be removed.
A communiqué adopted at the end of the session was stated to have declared that “the top priority of the CCDI’s work in 2019 remains firmly safeguarding Xi’s status as the core”.
The work report of Zhao Leji, the chief of the CCDI, published on the CCDI’s official website a month later, on Feb 20, ahead of China’s upcoming annual meetings of the national legislature and the top political advisory body, was stated to have singled out the cases of Sun Zhengcai and Lu Wei when elaborating on how to “firmly safeguard Xi’s status”.
Both Sun (the former top leader of Chongqing city) and Lu (China’s former internet czar) were charged with bribery and Zhao has stressed that the CCDI should firmly punish those “disloyal, dishonest, and two-faced” people like Lu.
