“Chinese rulers have long used campaigns against corruption to sideline rivals and consolidate power. Xi Jinping is increasingly tying his authority to a new variation: a purge that never ends,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“With echoes of Mao Zedong’s ‘continuous revolution,’ Xi has sent fear rippling through the ranks of the Communist Party for more than a decade with the largest campaign against corruption in modern Chinese history.
It is now threatening to petrify the party as it tries to steer the world’s second-largest economy through its greatest period of uncertainty in a generation.”“Since he came to power in 2012, party enforcers have punished roughly five million people for offenses as serious as abuse of power and as innocuous as creating excessive red tape.”