Nearly 350,000 Chinese cadres disciplined during Xi Jinping’s austerity campaign

High-ranking ‘tigers’ – and many more ordinary ‘flies’ – punished for breaking the rules in six-year crackdown on extravagance

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High-ranking “tigers” have drawn most of the attention, but 99 per cent of the cadres punished in the campaign are ordinary “flies” at county level or below. Photo: Simon Song

Published: 9:31pm, 5 Dec 2018Updated: 11:20pm, 5 Dec 2018

Nearly 350,000 cadres have been disciplined by the ruling Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog in the six years since President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on extravagance began.

That means more than 2 per cent of cadres – there were 12.5 million of them directly working for the party and the government in 2016, according to the statistics bureau – have faced disciplinary action as a result of the campaign.

And they were from all levels of China’s government apparatus, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the graft-buster said disciplinary action had been taken against 25 officials at the ministerial or provincial level, and 28,532 county or divisional level officials had been punished for breaking the eight austerity rules announced by Xi in 2012.

A total of 68,500 cadres at all levels were punished for disciplinary violations in the first 10 months of this year alone, the CCDI said. The punishments ranged from a verbal warning to jail time.

The austerity rules include reducing inappropriate use of public money – such as unnecessary travel, improper allocation and use of official housing and vehicles, and lavish banquets.

They also cover how cadres should carry out their duties, with Xi telling them to be aware of “bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance” in their working lives.