When Xi Jinping rose to power as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he kicked off a sweeping campaign to eliminate corruption across government. Xi vowed to discipline both “tigers” and “flies” — high-ranking party leaders and low-level bureaucrats — and warned officials of the risk that corruption posed to the government’s legitimacy. Official efforts to address corruption were hardly new in China, but Xi’s anticorruption drive was notable for its aggressive enforcement and willingness to pursue even the most powerful. Xi empowered and expanded the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the highest supervisory organ of the party, while also reorganizing the government to create a new National Supervisory Commission (NSC) that would unify the state’s anticorruption enforcement. Xi’s enforcers employed harsh rhetoric, seeking to deter corruption by strict enforcement. Twelve years later, millions of officials have been disciplined or purged, including top party figures such as former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai and former security minister Zhou Yongkang. Under China’s draconian criminal justice system, such defendants stand little chance. And private individuals have not been spared, with prominent industry and business leaders caught up in bribery and corruption investigations. On top of this sweeping crackdown, Xi has taken steps to permanently institutionalize anticorruption across the party and government.

In many respects, Xi has done much of what anticorruption practitioners advocate for: He has prioritized anticorruption at the highest level of government, increased enforcement dramatically, and reformed both government and political institutions. There are signs that his anticorruption efforts have paid off. Public perception of government has improved, with officials wary of ostentatious consumption of luxury goods and other openly corrupt behavior. Xi himself declared overwhelming victory in the fight against corruption in early 2024.

Yet despite the impressive numbers, Xi’s campaign has failed to address the underlying dynamics driving corruption in China. Indeed, the fact that anticorruption authorities continue to catch record-breaking numbers of corrupt officials at all levels of government may be a warning sign, not a marker of success. While Xi’s campaign is viewed in some quarters as a model for top-down, government-led anticorruption campaigns, China’s experience over the last dozen years also highlights the inherent limitations of that approach.

Despite Xi’s commitment to anticorruption, his top-down enforcement-heavy approach neglected—indeed, deliberately rejected—deeper structural reforms, such as asset disclosures, government transparency, and strengthening the role of an independent media and autonomous civil society. This is unsurprising: Xi has little incentive to adopt such changes, which would create alternative power bases besides the party and threaten China’s authoritarian political system. But these missed opportunities, along with a widespread perception of politicization and arbitrary top-down enforcement, will likely continue to hamper China’s anticorruption efforts. When criticism of the party and government by private citizens is generally censored, uncovering wrongdoing becomes the sole province of central government organs like the CCDI. But it is impossible for any centralized body to exercise effective oversight over the entirety of the sprawling Chinese bureaucracy. Without the cooperation of civil society actors, top-down review will inevitably miss small-scale graft across the country. And the lack of government transparency means much corruption will ultimately go undetected. These structural issues likely condemn China to a future of suppressing, and not preventing, corruption.

Additionally, Xi’s anticorruption crackdown has been dogged from the beginning by the perception that it was, at least in part, a political ploy to eliminate political rivals and consolidate his own power. For example, Zhou Yongkang and his associates constituted a rival power base to Xi, and their downfall led to increased centralization of Xi’s authority. Xi’s defenders may point out the broad scale and long-lasting nature of the campaign, as well as its willingness to break political norms against the prosecution of Politburo Standing Committee members, as evidence that the anticorruption campaign was not simply a pretext to purge political opponents. But it is perfectly possible for Xi to legitimately recognize corruption as a threat that needs to be eliminated, yet also conveniently prioritize rivals for prosecution. Given the opacity of China’s political system, the perception of politicization has continued, whether or not it is well-founded. While any given official may have rightfully been prosecuted for legitimate corruption, selective enforcement can undermine the legitimacy of the overall anticorruption campaign and create the perception that loyalty to Xi will immunize an official from investigation. And the undeniable effect of the campaign has been to centralize power to an unprecedented degree and stack the party with loyalists.

Today, Xi has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. His popularity and legitimacy, however, rest on an increasingly unstable foundation as the economy slows, geopolitical challenges mount, and demographic and social divisions increase. The persistence of corruption across all levels of Chinese government will likely prove to be a serious governance and legitimacy challenge to the party, as Xi himself predicted in 2012. So, the while results from Xi’s campaign hold important lessons for other countries, those lessons may not be the ones that the Chinese government likes to trumpet. The experience of the last 12 years suggests that while top-down discipline is often necessary to crack down on corruption, it cannot by itself change the underlying dynamics driving corruption.