Chinese TV series shines light on Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crusade

In a government building packed with Chinese Communist party cadres, a senior official warns that a campaign to root out corruption and vice will target not just criminal gangs but his fellow apparatchiks — at the orders of China’s all-powerful president himself.

“Now it’s time to turn the blade of the knife inwards,” said the official. “This strategic decision comes from the party central committee and its core, comrade Xi Jinping.”

Thus begins crime drama The Knockout, one of China’s most popular recent television shows, which dramatises President Xi Jinping’s sweeping crackdown on corruption — one of the broadest in the party’s history and a hallmark of his decade-long term in power.

At a time when the party’s credibility has been strained by a slowing economy and chaotic exit from its zero-Covid policy, highlighting the anti-corruption campaign is seen as a way to shore up its legitimacy as Xi begins an unprecedented third term in office.

The series hints at “the party’s concerns that its legitimacy has taken a hit from the zero-Covid policy and economic slowdown”, said Yuen Yuen Ang, professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of China’s Gilded Age, which examines corruption in China.

“Anti-corruption is seen as a means to restore the party’s integrity and vigour on its own initiative and thereby avert social discontent,” she added.

Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, launched an anti-graft campaign in 2013 against systemic corruption that he argued was undermining the Communist party’s authority — and to neutralise potential political rivals, according to observers of Chinese politics.

The campaign netted prominent national figures such as Zhou Yongkang, China’s former security chief, and Ling Jihua, a top aide to former president Hu Jintao.

“The two previous major factions in the party — the Shanghai faction [of late president Jiang Zemin] and the Communist Youth League [of former president Hu] — have been marginalised through Xi Jinping’s masterful use of the anti-corruption drive,” said Willy Lam, an expert in Chinese politics at the Jamestown Foundation think-tank in Washington.

“I think Xi Jinping will continue to use this technique because there are still factions who don’t see eye to eye with him,” Lam said, adding that the crackdown had shifted to target public security officials and businesspeople seen as aligned with rival factions such as in the tech sector.

At the CCP’s 20th congress in October, where he secured a third term as party leader and military chief, Xi boasted that 207,000 “top leaders” at all levels had been investigated by the country’s feared discipline inspection and supervision organs.

Ling Li, a Chinese politics expert at the University of Vienna, said that the campaign, while rooting out corrupt officials, was selective in terms of its targets for investigation. “There might be corruption everywhere, so why do you only go after these guys?”

Rather than slowing as Xi consolidated power, the crackdown has accelerated in recent months. This week, authorities announced an investigation into China’s national football association chief Chen Xuyuan.

“There appears to be an intense revival of anti-corruption in the beginning of 2023,” said Ang.

The party’s censors have increasingly turned to television. Aside from the 39-episode The Knockout, which aired its finale this month, programmes such as Crime Crackdown released in 2021 and In the Name of the People in 2017 focused on the anti-corruption crusade.

Last year, China Central Television, a state-owned broadcaster, aired a five-part series, Zero Tolerance, in which convicted CCP officials gave on-screen confessions that revealed their abuse of power.

Viewers were not convinced: many said the officials appeared unapologetic on screen and their sentences were too lenient.

The Knockout, with higher production value and a more nuanced plot focusing on the decades-long rivalry between a clean cop and a crime boss, has drawn stronger reviews. It has also been much more popular.

“The story is based on real events. It’s very exciting, while reflecting the darkness of the political and legal system,” said Wang Xingrui, a management student in Zhengzhou, in China’s central Henan province.

But in many respects, The Knockout adheres to the party line. Unlike Hollywood narratives that celebrate the renegade individual’s ability to disrupt the system, the policeman obeys the party hierarchy, awaiting his orders before acting.

“Hollywood has a lot of superheroes — Americans like them. But the hero in Chinese propaganda shows like this one, they cannot work alone,” said the University of Vienna’s Li.

“All the wrongs have to be corrected through the authorisation of the higher authority of the party, which is not corruptible.”