Xi’s enforcers punished nearly a million in 2025—and China’s leader wants more

Weeks before Beijing is set to launch a new economic blueprint for the next five years, Xi ordered the party’s discipline inspectors to flex their supervisory powers even more forcefully and ensure his policies are executed as intended.

“Corruption is a major obstacle and a stumbling block in the advancement of the party and the nation’s causes," Xi said this week at a conclave of the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. This year, he said, party inspectors must help enforce the top leadership’s decisions more resolutely, and ensure Beijing achieves its goals in the new five-year plan.

Party authorities pushed their disciplinary crackdown to new heights in 2025, when a record 983,000 people were disciplined, according to data published Saturday. This represents a 10.6% increase from what was already a record year in 2024, and the highest annual total since the party started releasing such data about two decades ago.

State media expounded on Xi’s message, saying Beijing’s plans are still being frustrated by misguided and foot-dragging bureaucrats across the country—and the party must do more to rein them in.

“Some areas follow trends blindly" and pursue projects in high-profile sectors championed by Beijing, such as semiconductors, electric vehicles and lithium batteries, even though local conditions aren’t conducive for such industries, the party’s flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, said in a front-page commentary on Xi’s remarks.

When officials implement policies in ways that are detached from reality, “it’s easy for things to become distorted and good scripture to become twisted," the newspaper said. The key to preventing such distortions is to “govern the party with strict discipline."

By the party’s own admission, the purges have also made many officials reluctant to act decisively and fuelled bureaucratic inertia when China needs more local dynamism to overcome economic challenges.

Xi has tried to address the problem by telling officials that honest mistakes can be tolerated and strict discipline shouldn’t sap their can-do spirit. The party has reported punishing more than 140,800 people for offenses related to policy inaction, recklessness or deceit from January to November last year, surpassing the 2024 total of nearly 138,000 people.

The high volume of such cases underscores Beijing’s challenge in getting lower-level governments to do its bidding, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

The central leadership’s decisions “must be resolutely and effectively implemented," Xinhua said. Officials at all levels must “understand the party center’s strategic intentions, and they mustn’t discount, alter or distort them," it said.

The crackdown on corruption, first launched when Xi took power in late 2012, has evolved into a continuous wave of probes that go beyond policing graft and aim to compel loyalty to Xi and his agenda. Authorities have since punished more than 7.2 million people, curbing some of the more egregious forms of graft that had prevailed before Xi and cementing his stature as China’s most dominant leader in decades.

In the past three years, party inspectors have swept through industries including finance, healthcare and defense, while rounding up scores of senior officials, executives and military commanders.

Targets included people once seen as Xi’s protégés, such as He Weidong, who had been China’s No. 2 general and a member of the elite Politburo before the party expelled him on corruption charges in October.

Another Politburo member, former regional leader Ma Xingrui, has missed a series of high-level meetings in recent months, stirring speculation over his fate. Ma’s unexplained absence and He’s expulsion have left the Politburo with 22 publicly active members.

State television publicized some high-profile corruption cases in a four-part documentary series aired this week, which featured confessional interviews with disgraced officials—including a former agriculture minister and a onetime top banker turned regional leader.

The series detailed how these officials were corrupted through a process known as “encirclement hunting," whereby unscrupulous businesspeople spend time and money plying officials and their families with financial benefits, and then persuading them to reciprocate with political favors.

Xi’s latest purges have even buffeted the agency that oversees the crackdown. The CCDI conclave that ended Wednesday was attended by 120 commission members, or 90% of the original 133 members appointed for the current term of office. It is the lowest participation rate at such conclaves since 1986, according to a Wall Street Journal review of attendance data.

While nonattendance doesn’t necessarily indicate political trouble, many absentees were senior military officers whose careers have come under a cloud as Beijing conducted an anticorruption shake-up across China’s defense establishment. The absentees included a general who was dismissed as a lawmaker late last year and a former deputy discipline-inspection chief for the military.

At its conclave, the CCDI said its priorities this year include the enforcement of political loyalty, as well as continued efforts to curb corruption in sectors such as finance, energy, education and state-owned enterprises. They will also tackle emergent and “hidden" forms of corruption, such as deferred bribe payments and “revolving doors" through which officials can move between public office and corporate jobs.

“We must unswervingly maintain a high-pressure posture," Xi told the CCDI. “Corruption must be countered, graft must be eradicated, and evil must be eradicated, so that corrupt elements have no place to hide."

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com