Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: Another Chinese Politburo member faces official investigation, Taiwan’s opposition leader visits China, and a Chinese researcher dies under suspicious circumstances at a U.S. university.
Xi’s Purge Targets Politburo Member
Ma Xingrui, a former high-flying technocrat and Xinjiang party secretary, is officially under investigation for corruption charges. That makes him the third member of the current Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo to fall amid President Xi Jinping’s latest purge, as well as the first civilian member.
There are two likely reasons for Ma’s targeting. The first is that Ma was exceptionally capable. He handled politically sensitive assignments in Xinjiang and earlier in Guangdong and the city of Shenzhen with skill and ruthlessness. As I noted in last week’s China Brief, Xi tends to find that kind of talent and ambition threatening.
Second, it’s possible that Ma’s background leading China’s space agencies connected him to the corruption being probed within the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. However, Ma left the aerospace sector in 2013, before the Second Artillery Corps was reorganized into the Rocket Force and received the surge of funding and authority that enabled such corruption.
Ma’s time in Xinjiang certainly offered opportunities for large-scale graft, from the expropriation of Uyghur property and businesses to the notoriously corrupt paramilitary organization that runs much of the region’s industry, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.
Whatever the reason, Ma now finds himself facing down a bleak process of interrogation and punishment, and his former status offers him only a little protection.
What happens once a purge target such as Ma is formally investigated? Before 2018, the first step was shuanggui—a technically illegal but normalized practice of secret detention in which suspects were held in isolated locations, often repurposed hotels or villas, and interrogated brutally.
The current system used to hold officials, liuzhi, was introduced under the 2018 National Supervision Law as a more formal replacement for shuanggui. But in practice, the differences are minor: Detention is nominally capped at six months, and interrogations now take place in an extensive network of secretive facilities. (The process remains separate from the regular justice system.)
Unlike regular prisoners, detainees in liuzhi have no access to legal representation or outside contact, and physical and psychological torture is common. The aim is not to determine guilt—detention itself implies that—but to extract confessions, map networks, and generate evidence against others. It is a political process as much as a legal one.
There is a certain irony in Ma’s case. As Xinjiang party secretary, he oversaw systems of mass detention and torture. Yet as a senior official, he is unlikely to face physical torture himself. That is a marked contrast with the Mao Zedong era, when purged elites such as Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi were routinely tortured, following patterns in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The comparatively restrained treatment of today’s fallen high-level officials is a result of compromises reached under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, part of a broader effort to move away from Maoist political extremism. These unwritten rules will benefit Ma when he enters the formal justice system, which could be six to 18 months from now.
Though officials accused of major corruption usually receive death sentences, these are almost always issued as “death penalty with reprieve.” Technically, this means that if they commit another crime in the two years after sentencing, they can be executed, but that never happens.
Actual sentence lengths remain opaque: The CCP avoids publicizing releases. But I’ve heard from retired officials and the family members of fallen officials that a decade-long sentence is typical, except in the most sensitive cases.
Once sentenced, former officials typically serve their time in relatively comfortable high-end cells at Qincheng Prison, near Beijing. (As a Soviet-era joke goes, when officials are debating whether to build a new school or a new prison, one asks, “Comrades, who here expects to go back to school?”)
One reason the CCP can allow some leniency is that it uses fallen officials’ families as leverage to ensure they don’t cause trouble when released. Part of the post-Mao bargain seems to be allowing these families to retain some wealth—enough to prevent them from talking but not enough to buy influence.
Even as Xi continues his anti-corruption sweep through the CCP and the military, he seems to be allowing these informal cushions to stay in place. If they were ever removed, however, high-level Chinese politics would become more cutthroat—and the chance of movement against Xi would rise accordingly.
What We’re Following
Kuomintang leader in Beijing. Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), arrived in Beijing on Tuesday ahead of a potential meeting with Xi. If it goes ahead, it will mark the first high-level engagement between the KMT and the CCP in a decade.
The KMT maintains closer ties to China than Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which often accuses the KMT of acting as a conduit for Chinese interests. That perceived closeness has cost the KMT politically in recent years, as public distrust of Beijing has deepened.
There is a strategic angle for Taiwan here: The more China believes it can somehow achieve reunification politically, the less inclined it may be to accept the risks of invasion.
Suspicious death on U.S. campus. Chinese diplomats have drawn attention to the death of Danhao Wang, a researcher at the University of Michigan who died on campus in late March following alleged questioning by U.S. federal law enforcement about his work with the university. University police said they were investigating Wang’s death as a “possible act of self-harm.”
During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, the China Initiative—a controversial anti-espionage program—disproportionately targeted ethnically Chinese scientists and was widely considered a failure. In his second term, Trump’s focus has shifted toward perceived domestic enemies, but it’s possible that similar efforts targeting foreigners are ramping up again.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Five Scenarios for a U.S. Ground War on Iranby Arash Reisinezhad
- Trump Is Losing the War in Iranby Ravi Agrawal
- Why Trump’s Speech Was So Worryingby Howard W. French
Tech and Business
Energy stockpiling. China is weathering the closure of the Strait of Hormuz better than most of Asia, despite relying on energy imports from the Gulf. A key reason is Beijing’s decade-long effort to reduce areas of foreign dependence—something the Trump administration discovered last year when it searched for points of leverage after China’s threats to critical mineral supplies.
For instance, China once relied on imports for jet fuel, but a surge in domestic production in the 2010s turned it into a net exporter. Though the current crisis has led to export restrictions, it has not threatened domestic supply. Insecurities exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the chaotic trade environment of Trump’s first term accelerated this push for self-reliance.
Anti-scam campaigns. Following the January arrest of Chen Zhi, a notorious Chinese-born businessman based in Cambodia, China is intensifying its campaign against his conglomerate, the Prince Group, which already faces U.S. and U.K. sanctions for operating scam centers and cryptocurrency schemes. Last week, Cambodia repatriated Li Xiong, one of Chen’s lieutenants.
A recent Guardianinvestigation revealed that the Prince Group’s operations extend beyond Cambodia. This raises concerns for the region because China’s approach to organized crime in Southeast Asia tends to be double-sided: It cracks down harshly when its citizens are targeted yet often cooperates with criminal groups for intelligence purposes.
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