By: Deyu Wang
When Beijing investigates a senior Tibetan, Hui, or Zhuang official for corruption, it is never just about corruption. The recent downfall of Qizhala, the ethnic Tibetan former chairman of Tibet; Lan Tianli, the ethnic Zhuang chairman of Guangxi; and Liu Hui, the ethnic Hui former chairwoman of Ningxia should be read less as legal justice than as political theater. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) practiced liangshao yikuan—“fewer arrests, fewer executions, and more leniency”—when it came to minority cadres. That policy, introduced in the 1980s by Hu Yaobang, is now being buried. Hu Yaobang, who served as CCP General Secretary from 1982 to 1987, was a leading reformist credited with advancing China’s opening and adopting a conciliatory approach toward Tibet, including easing restrictions on religion and acknowledging past Party mistakes.
The sheer scale of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign continues to be striking. In 2024 alone, 889,000 Party members were disciplined, more than four times the number in 2013. But Xi’s campaign has always been more than a bureaucratic crackdown on graft. It is his primary tool for consolidating power, disciplining loyalty, and reshaping how China manages its most sensitive regions.
Minority officials have traditionally functioned as mediators between Beijing and their home constituencies, commanding patronage networks that could operate semi-independently from the center. Their removal dismantles these local power bases and signals that authority must flow vertically to the Party leadership, not laterally through ethnic ties. For the central government, such networks are dangerous because they can nurture loyalties that compete with the Party’s monopoly on political legitimacy. In Tibet, for example, the reverence once shown to reform-era cadres such as Wu Jinghua—an ethnic Yi official who, in the 1980s, promoted greater cultural autonomy and won genuine local popularity—was viewed in Beijing as a double-edged sword: his influence elevated trust in the Party at the time, but it also demonstrated how a local minority leader could become more trusted than central authorities. The memory of such figures underscores the CCP’s fear that ethnic officials with strong community backing could become focal points of alternative authority in regions already prone to unrest.
Source: https://www.yibao.net/2025/09/02/xis-anti-corruption-drive-turns-on-chinas-ethnic-minorities/