China's Communist Party demands loyalty, vows to tighten discipline
BEIJING, Nov 1 (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party put the demand for loyalty front and centre in an official resolution on toughening internal discipline, and vowed to keep waging its high-pressure anti-corruption campaign to cleanse the party of "impurities and viruses".
The resolution, adopted during a key party leadership gathering this week and previewed in a shorter communique on Thursday, stressed the need to intensify efforts to instil loyalty to the party within its ranks, vet and promote officials based on their "party spirit" assessed through their day-to-day work, personal conduct and remarks, social contacts and family values, and carry forward its "self-revolution".
"The party's ranks are sound overall, but problems of ideological impurity, organisational impurity, and impure work style have not yet been fundamentally resolved," according to the resolution released by the state-run Xinhua news agency on Sunday.
The detailed document provided an updated framework for the party's more than decade-long discipline and anti-graft drive, which has ensnared millions within the country's vast bureaucracy.
It came roughly a year ahead of a leadership reshuffle when its leader, President Xi Jinping, is expected to secure another five-year term.
The party leadership called for closer, career-long oversight of cadres, including tighter checks on officials' personal disclosures and investigations where family assets or spending appear out of line with legitimate income.
It also called for routine scrutiny of the business activities of officials' family members.
The anti-corruption drive would take aim at hidden and tech-enabled graft, including proxy shareholdings, and the use of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and cross-border funds to facilitate corruption, the document showed.
Although the party drew attention to collective leadership and said party organisations must not require subordinates at successive levels to uphold the "personal authority" of those ultimately in charge, the provision appeared directed at curbing personalised rule in lower-level party and government bodies, rather than limiting the already consolidated authority within the central leadership.
The document called on party members to resolutely safeguard Xi's status as the party's "core" and to remain fully aligned with the top leadership "in thought, politics and action".
"Only by advancing full and rigorous party self-governance with unwavering persistence, and continually removing the viruses that corrode the party's healthy body, can the party be ensured never to lose its nature, conviction and character, and can the red country be passed down from generation to generation," Xi said in a speech explaining the resolution.
(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by William Mallard and Alex Richardson)
