Editor's note: Xia Lu, a research fellow at the National Academy for Development and Strategy and the Academy of Xi Jinping Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era at Renmin University of China; he is also deputy dean of the School of Marxism Studies at Xinjiang University, China. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

For a long time, Western public opinion outlets have had a systemic bias when they try to understand China's anti-corruption struggle, as they tend to use the so-called labeling stigmatization such as "factionalist struggles" and "selective law enforcement" to describe China.

However, not only did these labels ignore the institutionalization process of China's anti-corruption efforts, but they also fully expose the cognitive limitations of the Western-centric conventional perspective.

In fact,since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China's anti-corruption efforts have evolved far beyond short-term corrective measures; rather, a power supervision system that addresses both symptoms and root causes and ensures long-term operation has gradually taken shape.

The key to grasp the core of China's anti-corruption practice lies in the understanding of its systematic and institutional character. Following the reform of the oversight system in 2018, China's discipline inspection and supervision was extended to all public officials and cadres exercising public power, thus building an integrated supervision network spanning central and local governments and reaching down to the grassroots levels, significantly strengthening the accountability across the public sector.

Meanwhile, the regularization of disciplinary inspection has transformed the "sharp sword hanging high" anti-corruption oversight from a temporary deterrent into an institutional pressure transmission mechanism operating routinely. In reality, official statistics show that in 2024 alone, disciplinary inspection and supervision agencies nationwide filed 877,000 cases and handed disciplinary or administrative penalties to 889,000 individuals involved in corruption per the report, and the number of cases filed remained at a persistently high level – solid proof that China's anti-corruption effort is by no means "selective enforcement," but rather institutionalized and routine supervision.

More importantly, China is building a long-term anti-corruption mechanism that aims at promoting the integrated approach of "making sure officials don't dare to, are unable to and have no desire to commit corruption."

Among them, the "don't dare to commit corruption" policy leverages high-pressure punishment to create a deterrent effect; the "unable to commit corruption" policy relies on the internal Party regulatory system to tighten the institutional cage – so far, there are over 4,000 effective intra-Party regulations covering all areas and links of Party governance; and the "have no desire to commit corruption" one rests on education in ideals and beliefs and the construction of a culture of integrity to strengthen the ideological foundation. Such institutional design shifts anti-corruption from passive investigation to proactive prevention and preemption, from case-based handling to systematic governance, fully reflecting the CPC's deep grasp of its own laws of self-construction.

What's more, these institutional advantages are continuously being translated into real and tangible governance effectiveness and efficacy.

Taking rural revitalization as an example. Through measures such as stationing first secretaries, strengthening village-level supervision, and rolling out the "Small and Micro Power List," grassroots Party organizations have significantly improved their organizational mobilization capabilities.

In former deeply impoverished areas such as Nujiang in southwest China's Yunnan Province and Dingxi in northwest China's Gansu Province, it was precisely thanks to a rigorous organizational system and strict discipline that a historic leap in poverty alleviation was achieved.

In grassroots governance innovation practices, cases such as the Green Rural Revival Program in east China's Zhejiang Province, which plans to renovate about 10,000 incorporated villages and transform about 1,000 central villages among them into examples of moderate prosperity in all respects, and the "Swift Response to Public Complaints" reform in Beijing, the capital of China, demonstrate that when the Party's organizational advantages are precisely aligned with the needs of the people, tremendous governance effectiveness and efficacy can be unleashed.

In contrast, some Western countries have long suffered from deeply entrenched systemic corruption. For example, the "revolving door" phenomenon in American politics – where senior former government officials move into the lobbying arena of interest groups after leaving office and leverage their existing political and business connections to seek improper benefits for capital – has become an open secret.

The political donation system goes even further by legalizing the money-power exchange outright, and the Supreme Court's ruling to remove the cap on how much individual donors may contribute to candidates, political parties and political action committees has directly transformed the traditional "one person, one vote" electoral democracy into "one dollar, one vote" capitalist democracy. The frequent party funding scandals in many European countries and the persistent "politics and money" issues in Japanese politics all prove that the so-called democratic oversight of the West is equally inadequate in addressing deep-rooted structural corruption. These endogenous institutional flaws are the core issues truly worthy of deep reflection.

The fundamental reason the CPC has been able to maintain strong organizational mobilization capabilities for so long is that it has consistently maintained a clear and conscious spirit of self-revolution. Such self-revolution is by no means a one-off political movement, but a continuous process of innovation embedded in the fabric of the party system.

While some Western observers continue to interpret China's anti-corruption practices through outdated theoretical frameworks, China has already proven through concrete actions that Marxist parties can achieve long-term governance through sustained self-renewal and institutionalized self-supervision. Beyond its significance as governance wisdom of the Party in solving the unique challenges of large parties, this approach also provides a brand-new paradigm for the development of political parties worldwide.

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