The black box around Xi Jinping’s corruption crackdown has long fueled political gossip in China. Now, an underground market is emerging for selling purported secrets on who might be next to fall.
Across China’s tightly controlled internet, authorities are playing whack-a-mole to stop shadowy users who peddle access to groups claiming to leak details of which officials are under scrutiny, according to a recent report from Banyuetan, a magazine published by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Not all the information is reliable — some accounts fabricate allegations to drive traffic, Banyuetan said, with police in the southwestern province of Guizhou closing a number of such sites. Some tips, however, appear to originate from government officials — pointing to disloyalty within the ranks. In one case cited by Banyuetan, a low-ranking cadre in Guizhou obtained personnel information, then worked with six relatives to run nine WeChat accounts with the aim of boosting their online follower count.
There’s no indication the tip trading is used to profit off predicting the downfall of any particular officials, a burgeoning new business elsewhere in the world. Still, the practice underscores the prevailing sense of anxiety among Chinese officials as Xi’s anti-graft purges reach into new corners of the system. Three of the 24 members appointed to the current Politburo have been ousted, while a sweeping military purge has left the world’s largest standing army with the fewest leaders since the 1970s.
The groups are flourishing as Chinese politics approaches a particularly sensitive period. The Communist Party is embarking on its one-year countdown to next autumn’s leadership congress, where Xi may secure a precedent-defying fourth term and preside over a personnel reshuffle. Officials will jostle for promotions ahead of that twice-a-decade conclave, only deepening the demand for inside information.
In theory, tips on an impending investigation can enable a targeted official to prepare their defense, or help an ambitious cadre cultivate the right relationships to shape their career. For investors, early warnings a provincial leader is under scrutiny provide time to offload any assets associated with exposed companies.
“Advance knowledge of a promotion, investigation, or purge can be commercially valuable to companies trying to assess political exposure, manage government relations, and determine which official relationships remain viable,” said Neil Thomas, senior fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “Cadres themselves also have strong incentives to understand personnel shifts that could affect their careers or political networks.”
Party discipline
Xi vowed to take down both “tigers” and “flies” — high and low ranking officials — shortly after assuming power 14 years ago. His goal was to clean up the Communist Party after decades of what he saw as disciplinary drift during the nation’s transformation toward a market-oriented economy.
With that initiative showing no sign of slowing, speculation has increasingly circulated on Chinese social media, long before the paid groups emerged — and sometimes with striking accuracy.
On the morning of Feb. 10, for example, China’s top graft buster announced an investigation into Yi Lianhong, a former Communist Party chief of Zhejiang province. Yet talk of Yi’s downfall had already circulated in regular chat groups for days.
An official’s absence from political events is often the first sign of trouble. Months later, authorities typically announce a cadre is suspected of “serious violations of discipline and law,” offering no details while an investigation proceeds.
Probes involving party officials can be especially opaque. Party members are generally first handled inside the Communist Party’s disciplinary system. Cases involving suspected crimes may later be transferred to prosecutors, often after party sanctions have already been announced.
The paid chat rooms appear to go further by throwing a spotlight on officials before any public sign of their downfall, according to the report. Bloomberg News couldn’t gain access to such groups online or independently verify the reports.
The Fifth Plenum scheduled for October will focus on disciplinary issues, as it seeks to draw on the “valuable lessons” of the anti-corruption campaign, according to the readout of the Politburo’s July meeting. The closed-door meeting is expected to confirm the removal of senior officials from the party’s Central Committee and elevate alternate members to fill vacancies.
It will also offer clues about the qualities Xi will reward when selecting his next cohort in 2027 — with loyalty, discipline and the ability to carry out his priorities likely to loom large.
Such horse trading is only likely to fuel demand for the allegedly official leaks that the Banyuetan report rallied against.
For regulators, the coded nature of the posts presents a legal and practical challenge. Publishing an official’s publicly available resume is not itself illegal, nor does it necessarily constitute spreading a rumor or leaking a state secret. Police may also lack enough information about a confidential investigation to determine whether an online claim is false.
That leaves authorities struggling to suppress a market generated, in part, by the political system’s own secrecy.
“The more sensational the claim, the more attention it attracts,” said Thomas of Asia Society Policy Institute. “Sticking to the facts quickly becomes dull when so little is known about internal maneuvering in Beijing compared with democratic political systems.”
