China must step up vigilance against corruption in order to safeguard against a Soviet-style collapse, Reuters quoted second most senior graft buster as saying in an editorial on Wednesday.
Yang Xiaodu, the deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, who was promoted to the ruling Communist Party’s 25-strong Politburo last month, said that failure would risk the “red country changing colour.”
Criticising previous administrations, Yang said “in a previous record”, corruption has been allowed to fester to such an extent that the party’s leadership had weakened, with supervision, and ideology apathetic.
"It had developed to the point where if not rectified, the country could change colour," Yang wrote in the official People's Daily.
"The future fate of the party and the country's people could follow the same old road to ruin as the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc."
Like other leaders before him, President Xi Jinping too believes that loosening control too quickly or even at all could lead to chaos and the break of the country.
Yang's editorial is the latest salvo signalling that the intensity of Xi's signature war on corruption would not wane despite the departure of Xi's right-hand man, Wang Qishan, who was widely seen as China's second most powerful politician before being replaced as anti-corruption chief in a leadership reshuffle last month.
Wang's replacement Zhao Leji, who has been tasked to lead Jinping’s signature war, wrote a similarly strongly worded editorial in the state-run People’s Daily that failure would lead to the party’s downfall.
“If our control of the party is not strong and party governance is not strict, then the party won’t be able to avoid being erased by history and the historic task the party carries will not be able to be fulfilled,” Zhao wrote.
