The Chinese regime has launched an expansive new political purge targeting officials across the regime’s institutions, according to insiders from within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Beijing is preparing for a major leadership reshuffle ahead of the 21st National Congress of the CCP, which is scheduled for late 2027.
The campaign, driven by China’s top anti-corruption bodies, has rapidly widened over the past year to include investigations into officials’ assets, political loyalties, and personal networks, the sources said. They described the effort as one of the broadest internal crackdowns in years, reaching from provincial bureaucracies down to village-level officials.
The insiders spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
“The disciplinary system has become one of the busiest institutions in China right now,” said one insider within the CCP’s political establishment.
According to him, CCP leadership is using the anti-corruption apparatus not only to punish corruption, but also to map political relationships throughout the bureaucracy ahead of next year’s Party congress, where top personnel decisions are expected to be finalized.
“Xi Jinping’s personnel arrangements for the 21st Party Congress have to start from the grassroots, where it’s easiest to break through,” the insider said. “People are being detained every day.”
The CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission—China’s two main anti-corruption bodies, which operate under a unified structure—have intensified investigations into sectors including finance, public security, state-owned enterprises, health care, energy, and tobacco, according to the sources.
Detention Centers and Internal Informants
The insider said the regime has established temporary detention and investigation sites across China, including converted guesthouses used by disciplinary inspection teams.“Every inspection team receives a huge volume of reports wherever they go,” he said. “Some come from government employees, some from petitioners, etc.”
He added that personal relationships have become a major source of politically damaging information.
“Some cases would never have been discovered otherwise,” he said. “For example, properties in Japan or Australia that nobody knew about ended up being exposed because a mistress reported them.”
Another insider from within the CCP told The Epoch Times the current campaign quietly began last year and has already surpassed the scale of investigations seen over the previous decade combined.
According to a report from Chinese state media People’s Daily on April 24, the CCP’s disciplinary authorities opened 245,000 cases in the first quarter of 2026 alone and punished 183,000 people. The figures included investigations into 56 provincial- and ministerial-level officials, 1,267 department-level officials, 10,000 county-level cadres, and 33,000 township-level officials.
The regime also investigated 23,000 current and former village Party secretaries and village committee directors during the same period.
The insider said the sheer volume of cases has overwhelmed the system.
“In just the first three months of this year, around 90 provincial- and ministerial-level officials were either investigated or punished, and those were only the announced ones,” he said. “For lower-ranking officials, especially at the township level, the numbers are already in the hundreds of thousands.”
New Corruption Threshold
The scale of the campaign has drawn additional attention after the CCP’s top judicial authorities raised the criminal threshold for corruption-related charges.On April 10, the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate raised the threshold for prosecuting officials for “property of unclear origin” from 300,000 yuan (about $44,000) to 3 million yuan ($440,000).
This means that discrepancies between 300,000 and 3 million yuan—once routinely prosecuted—may now fall outside the scope of criminal charges.
The insider said the change reflects mounting pressure on the disciplinary system as investigations spread deeper into China’s bureaucracy.
According to the insider, the Party’s inspection teams initially focused on provincial- and departmental-level officials last year before expanding investigations this year to county, township, and eventually village-level cadres.
He cited one county in Gansu Province where investigators allegedly uncovered more than 300 grassroots officials implicated in corruption.
Political Motives
A Chinese scholar questioned whether the campaign is aimed solely at fighting corruption or whether it also serves a broader political purpose ahead of the CCP’s next leadership transition.A scholar based in Guizhou, China, told The Epoch Times the campaign appears designed to restructure political loyalties throughout the bureaucracy before next year’s Party congress.
He called the campaign “a comprehensive political cleanup of the entire bureaucratic system by the CCP.”
He said local governments in some regions have already had large numbers of senior officials detained.
“In one county here, dozens of officials—from the top leader down to lower-ranking deputies—have already been detained,” he said. “When they investigate 10 people now, nine have problems. Eventually, they had to widen the filter.”
The scholar said that the campaign reflects Xi’s effort to consolidate control over local governments, financial institutions, state-owned enterprises, and security agencies before the 21st National Congress.
“The recent fall of officials in finance, public security, state-owned enterprises, and local fiscal systems is far beyond ordinary anti-corruption,” he said. “It’s a clear signal that Xi Jinping is reshaping the system and preparing a new governing structure.”