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Welcome to\u00a0Foreign Policy<\/em>\u2019s China Brief.<\/p>\n The highlights this week: Another Chinese Politburo member<\/strong> faces official investigation, Taiwan\u2019s opposition leader<\/strong> visits China, and a Chinese researcher<\/strong> dies under suspicious circumstances at a U.S. university.<\/p>\n \t Ma Xingrui, a former high-flying technocrat and Xinjiang party secretary, is officially under investigation for corruption charges<\/a>. That makes him the third member of the current Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo to fall amid President Xi Jinping\u2019s latest purge, as well as the first civilian member.<\/p>\n There are two likely reasons for Ma\u2019s targeting. The first is that Ma was exceptionally capable. He handled politically sensitive assignments in Xinjiang and earlier in Guangdong and the city of Shenzhen with skill and ruthlessness. As I noted<\/a> in last week\u2019s China Brief, Xi tends to find that kind of talent and ambition threatening.<\/p>\n Second, it\u2019s possible that Ma\u2019s background<\/a> leading China\u2019s space agencies connected him to the corruption being probed within the People\u2019s Liberation Army Rocket Force. However, Ma left the aerospace sector in 2013, before the Second Artillery Corps was reorganized into the Rocket Force and received the surge of funding and authority that enabled such corruption.<\/p>\n Ma\u2019s time in Xinjiang certainly offered opportunities for large-scale graft, from the expropriation of Uyghur property and businesses<\/a> to the notoriously corrupt paramilitary organization that runs much of the region\u2019s industry, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.<\/p>\n Whatever the reason, Ma now finds himself facing down a bleak process of interrogation and punishment, and his former status offers him only a little protection.<\/p>\n What happens once a purge target such as Ma is formally investigated? Before 2018, the first step was shuanggui<\/em>\u2014a technically illegal but normalized<\/a> practice of secret detention in which suspects were held in isolated locations, often repurposed hotels or villas, and interrogated brutally.<\/p>\n The current system used to hold officials, liuzhi<\/em>, was introduced under the 2018 National Supervision Law as a more formal replacement for shuanggui. But in practice, the differences are minor: Detention is nominally capped at six months, and interrogations now take place in an extensive network<\/a> of secretive facilities. (The process remains separate from the regular justice system.)<\/p>\n Unlike regular prisoners, detainees in liuzhi have no access to legal representation or outside contact, and physical and psychological torture is common. The aim is not to determine guilt\u2014detention itself implies that\u2014but to extract confessions, map networks, and generate evidence against others. It is a political process as much as a legal one.<\/p>\n There is a certain irony in Ma\u2019s case. As Xinjiang party secretary, he oversaw<\/a> systems of mass detention and torture. Yet as a senior official, he is unlikely to face physical torture himself. That is a marked contrast with the Mao Zedong era, when purged elites such as Peng Dehuai<\/a> and Liu Shaoqi<\/a> were routinely tortured, following patterns in Joseph Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union.<\/p>\n The comparatively restrained treatment of today\u2019s fallen high-level officials is a result of compromises reached under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, part of a broader effort to move away from Maoist political extremism. These unwritten rules will benefit Ma when he enters the formal justice system, which could be six to 18 months from now.<\/p>\n Though officials accused of major corruption usually receive death sentences, these are almost always issued as \u201cdeath penalty with reprieve<\/a>.\u201d Technically, this means that if they commit another crime in the two years after sentencing, they can be executed, but that never happens.<\/p>\n Actual sentence lengths remain opaque: The CCP avoids publicizing releases. But I\u2019ve heard from retired officials and the family members of fallen officials that a decade-long sentence is typical, except in the most sensitive cases.<\/p>\n Once sentenced, former officials typically serve their time in relatively comfortable<\/a> high-end cells at Qincheng Prison, near Beijing. (As a Soviet-era joke goes, when officials are debating whether to build a new school or a new prison, one asks, \u201cComrades, who here expects to go back to school?\u201d)<\/p>\n One reason the CCP can allow some leniency is that it uses fallen officials\u2019 families as leverage to ensure they don\u2019t cause trouble when released. Part of the post-Mao bargain seems to be allowing these families to retain some wealth\u2014enough to prevent them from talking but not enough to buy influence.<\/p>\n Even as Xi continues his anti-corruption sweep through the CCP and the military, he seems to be allowing these informal cushions to stay in place. If they were ever removed, however, high-level Chinese politics would become more cutthroat\u2014and the chance of movement against Xi would rise accordingly.<\/p>\n Kuomintang leader in Beijing. <\/strong>Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan\u2019s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), arrived<\/a> in Beijing on Tuesday ahead of a potential meeting with Xi. If it goes ahead, it will mark the first high-level engagement between the KMT and the CCP in a decade.<\/p>\n The KMT maintains closer ties to China than Taiwan\u2019s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which often accuses the KMT of acting as a conduit for Chinese interests. That perceived closeness has cost the KMT politically<\/a> in recent years, as public distrust of Beijing has deepened.<\/p>\n There is a strategic angle for Taiwan here: The more China believes it can somehow achieve reunification politically, the less inclined it may be to accept the risks of invasion.<\/p>\n Suspicious death on U.S. campus.<\/strong> Chinese diplomats have drawn attention<\/a> to the death of Danhao Wang, a researcher at the University of Michigan who died on campus in late March following alleged questioning by U.S. federal law enforcement about his work with the university. University police said they were investigating Wang\u2019s death as a \u201cpossible act of self-harm<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n During U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s first term, the China Initiative\u2014a controversial anti-espionage program\u2014disproportionately targeted ethnically Chinese scientists and was widely considered<\/a> a failure. In his second term, Trump\u2019s focus has shifted toward perceived domestic enemies, but it\u2019s possible that similar efforts targeting foreigners are ramping up again.<\/p>\n Energy stockpiling.<\/strong> China is weathering<\/a> the closure of the Strait of Hormuz better than most of Asia<\/a>, despite relying on energy imports from the Gulf. A key reason is Beijing\u2019s decade-long effort to reduce areas of foreign dependence\u2014something the Trump administration discovered last year when it searched for points of leverage after China\u2019s threats to critical mineral supplies.<\/p>\n For instance, China once relied on imports for jet fuel<\/a>, but a surge in domestic production in the 2010s turned it into a net exporter<\/a>. Though the current crisis has led to export restrictions<\/a>, it has not threatened domestic supply. Insecurities exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the chaotic trade environment of Trump\u2019s first term accelerated this push for self-reliance.<\/p>\n Anti-scam campaigns.<\/strong> Following the January arrest of Chen Zhi, a notorious Chinese-born businessman based in Cambodia, China is intensifying its campaign against his conglomerate, the Prince Group, which already faces U.S. and U.K. sanctions for operating scam centers and cryptocurrency schemes. Last week, Cambodia repatriated Li Xiong<\/a>, one of Chen\u2019s lieutenants.<\/p>\n
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