You know, the Chinese Communist Party is a little like Smaug. Sure, it seems big and scary. But then it starts to show off, and reveals its greatest weakness. Anyway, it’s a common problem: The big scary bad guy has a glaring weakness.
In the Communist Party’s case, it’s corruption.
In 2012, then-Chinese leader Hu Jintao passed the torch to Xi Jinping.
But before he retired, Hu warned that failing to defeat corruption could bring down the Communist Party. And so Xi has made rooting out corruption kinda his thing. Since Xi’s anti-corruption campaign began in 2013, he’s taken down more than one million officials. That’s according to official statistics just released by the Central Commission on Disciplinary Inspection, the government organ in charge of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, and headed by China’s most woeful man, Wang Qishan.
But why stop at a million? Xi and Wang are just getting started. The Central Commission on Disciplinary Inspection also partnered with Party mouthpiece CCTV to make this, a reality show starring some of the biggest officials taken out.
It’s called “The Real Corrupt Officials of Beijing” “Always on the Road.” Weird. Fortunately, my favorite state-run media Global Times explains the unusual title:
