The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is facing persistent corruption scandals despite years of anti-corruption campaigns, with a Party journal recently outlining five doubts about the campaign.

In an article published ahead of the CCP’s Fifth Plenum, which is being held under the theme of enforcing strict Party discipline, Qiu Xinsong, a professor at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University’s discipline inspection and political-legal studies institute, identified five points he described as mistaken attitudes toward anti-corruption efforts. The article was published by the CCP’s official theoretical journal Qiushi.

The discussion comes as official figures continue to show a substantial number of senior officials under investigation.

Senior Officials Continue to Fall

The Epoch Times found that China’s disciplinary authorities opened investigations into 73 officials at the provincial-ministerial level or above during the first nine months of 2026.

For comparison, the regime investigated 73 officials at that level in all of 2024 and 115 in 2025, including 90 during the first nine months of that year.

A separate category, known as centrally managed officials, includes senior cadres directly overseen by the CCP’s Central Committee. According to figures reported by Hong Kong pro-Beijing outlet Ta Kung Wen Wei, the regime investigated 87 such officials in 2023, 92 in 2024, and 181 in 2025.

Nearly 60 centrally managed officials had been publicly announced as under investigation this year, according to the report, including two members of the CCP’s Politburo.

The crackdown has also affected the Central Committee elected at the party’s 20th National Congress in 2022. Based on the original membership of 376 full and alternate members, more than 70 have since been purged, according to The Epoch Times’ incomplete tally of publicly announced cases.

The scale of the removals has drawn attention because many of the officials were promoted under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has been described by state media Xinhua as personally vetting Central Committee members. Many officials elevated at the 2022 congress were widely regarded as political allies of Xi.

Canada-based Chinese pro-democracy activist and award-winning journalist Sheng Xue told The Epoch Times that the downfall of officials promoted by Xi raised questions about whether loyalty had been prioritized over competence and integrity. Alternatively, the cases could reflect corruption deeply embedded in the Party’s governing system.

Shen Ming-shih, a research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told The Epoch Times that the continuing corruption cases are due to several factors, including concentrated political power without independent oversight, institutional corruption, and internal struggles over diminishing resources as the economy slows.

5 Doubts About the Campaign

Qiu’s article described five doubts, including that corruption could not be eliminated, calls to ease the pressure, concerns that strict enforcement could harm economic development, arguments for leniency toward capable officials who accept bribes, and the belief that fighting corruption has little to do with ordinary Party members or the public.

Sheng said such doubts had surfaced repeatedly within the Party and in public discussion. She expected them to become more pronounced as Xi’s rule continues.

Shen said the article reflected a collective sense of passivity among officials. He also suggested that publishing the criticism ahead of the plenum was intended to suppress opposition within the Party to the ongoing campaign.

The article itself argued that corruption persists because the conditions that allow it to flourish have not been eliminated.

A Chinese lawyer who spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal said that the CCP’s political hierarchy systemically produces corrupt officials, making the anti-corruption campaign meaningless. As long as the underlying corrupt regime remains, new cases of corrupt officials will continue to emerge, the lawyer said.

Sheng argued that the Party cannot fully eliminate its own corrupt system without threatening its own authoritarian rule. 

“If the conditions that breed corruption disappear, that will be the day the CCP collapses,” Sheng said.

Tang Bing and Luo Ya contributed to this report.