The never-ending campaign against graft in China

While he was holed up in caves in Yan’an in 1938, Mao Zedong gave a series of speeches that would form one of his best-known works. In “On Protracted War” he argued that China, which had been invaded by Japan, should not expect a quick victory. It had to dig in for a long struggle.

Xi Jinping, China’s current ruler, is also fighting what he calls a “protracted war”. But the enemy in this struggle is official corruption. During Mr Xi’s first decade in power millions of cadres were investigated for graft, from low-ranking “flies” to high-ranking “tigers”, as the Communist Party calls them (see chart 1).