Over the past three decades, Xi had visited the United States six times, from the cornfields of Iowa to the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands in California. (Photo : Reuters)
China is dead set on making corruption in the government nonexistent. President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign is unlike other in that it has no plans of stopping until corruption has been eradicated.
Gone are the days when campaigns against graft scraped only the surface and only lasted for a limited time.
All Chinese republican regimes imposed their own anti-corruption campaign, but the impact had been limited. The efforts were not thorough, always stopping whenever a big fish had been caught and public scrutiny had already been satisfied.
However, the current regime just might be a cut above the rest. The campaign launched by President Xi Jinping since he became the country's leader in 2012 is set to go on "forever," as announced by Wang Qishan, the chief of the Communist Party's Discipline Commission.
The program started by going after the traditional suspects of corruption: highly placed real as well as possible political enemies. The purge has been extended to the provincial governments and even penetrated state-owned enterprises and the military. The regime's main broadcasting station has also not been spared.
The Communist Party's Discipline Commission's style of investigation in hunting of corrupt officials is in itself widely talked about. The commission can detains people for recurring six-month periods without charge in an unknown location even before their guilt could be confirmed. Their guilt, or lack thereof, could be confirmed even without public trial.
Once the verdict has been given, that would be the only time they would be handed over to the civilian courts. Widespread fear is said to have been cast among all public officials.
In line with the country's anti-corruption efforts, public officials are mandated to practice austerity. The government believes that clamping down on corruption can reduce the inefficiencies of many big state-owned enterprises, whose past operations were believed too costly with outcomes not as beneficial to the country's growth and development.
