Power Struggle or Strengthening the Party: Perspectives on Xi Jinping's Anticorruption Campaign

摘要

This review essay analyzes the literature dealing with Xi Jinping s anticorruption campaign. It identifies two major debates in the literature that see the campaign either as an inner-Party power struggle or as a genuine attempt to deal with the problem of corruption and organizational issues the Party is facing. In a second step, the review essay links these two understandings to larger trends in the understanding of the Chinese Communist Party in the literature. These understandings focus either on elite politics and theories of factionalism or connect to the larger debate on the decline versus resilience of the Party. It concludes that different understandings of Xi's campaign are not mutually exclusive but adopt different points of focus and are rooted in different debates on the Chinese Communist Party.