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President Xi Jinping has embarked on a “final round of purges” ahead of a major Chinese Communist Party congress, wielding his long-running anti-corruption campaign to cement his grasp on power, analysts say.

When he became leader a decade ago, Xi vowed to root out dishonest officials, both senior “tigers” and low-ranking “flies”.

More than 1.5 million officials have been punished since then, according to data from the party disciplinary body, and China’s ranking on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index has improved.

But critics say the campaign is also a thinly veiled political tool that has helped Xi eliminate his rivals — and the build-up to this year’s congress has seen more heads roll. 

About 1,100 officials have been caught in the party dragnet since the beginning of this year, according to party data.

Among them are former deputy public security minister Sun Lijun and former justice minister Fu Zhenghua, who will now spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

“This final round of purges, masquerading as an anti-corruption campaign, will ensure that Xi will have tighter if not absolute control over personnel and policy issues (at the Congress),” said Willy Lam, a political analyst at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Xi is widely expected to secure a third term as party leader at the meeting, upending the succession norms in place since the 1990s.

“Despite all signs that his major goal of a third term is pretty much guaranteed, Xi is still paranoid about his control over appointments to key decision-making bodies within the party,” Lam added.

– ‘Damaging party unity’ –

Once a trusted lieutenant of Xi, Sun oversaw security in Hong Kong during months of unrest in 2019 and was even sent to Wuhan at the start of the Covid pandemic.

But he reportedly fell from grace because of his political ambitions, and was officially accused of “seriously damaging the unity of the party”.

Sun confessed on national television in January to taking bribes worth $14 million, hidden inside boxes of what appeared to be seafood.

Others allegedly in his “political clique”, including Fu and three former police chiefs, were also rounded up and given harsh sentences.

“Sun Lijun’s case is linked to Xi’s absolute control of the security apparatus, which is indispensable for his political agenda,” said Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

“It also sends a stern message to anyone with dissenting views about Xi’s leadership.”

Chinese Communist Party politics — despite the facade of unity — has always been deeply factional with different groups vying for influence. 

“There are some who are anti-Xi but very pro-party. They don’t like where the party is heading under him,” Alex Payette, chief executive of consultancy Cercius Group, told AFP. 

The congress presents an opportunity for Xi to reduce that threat by promoting close allies to positions on the Politburo’s seven-person standing committee, the apex of power.

– ‘Absolute loyalty’ –

More than any other Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, Xi has built a strong personality cult, with children as young as 10 required to take lessons in “Xi Jinping Thought”.

And according to Wu Muluan, a Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore, he has used the anti-corruption campaign to turn the Communist Party “from a collective dictatorship to a personalist dictatorship”.

He has already brought under his wing the three critical power centres of the party — the military, the propaganda machine and the internal security apparatus — by rooting out dissenting voices and replacing them with his proteges. 

For example, the recently appointed minister of public security Wang Xiaohong has known Xi at least since the mid-1990s, when they were both working in southeastern Fujian province. 

“Xi is cherry-picking people who have shown absolute loyalty to him for decades,” Wu said.

Surrounding himself with allies going into his next term has become even more important given the significant political headwinds Xi faces, including an ailing economy, deteriorating relations with the United States and a strict zero-Covid policy that has accelerated China’s inward turn from the world.

“The anti-corruption card is a potent tool for Xi to send a message to the still-considerable number of opponents in the upper echelon of the party,” analyst Lam said.

“Any opposition could mean a jail term… or at least ugly harassment by the anti-graft agencies such as 24-hour surveillance.” 

When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, some observers predicted he would be the most liberal Communist Party leader in China’s history, based on his low-key profile, family backstory and perhaps a degree of misguided hope.

Ten years later, those forecasts lie in tatters, proving only how little was understood of the man who looks set to become China’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong at a major party congress this month.

Xi has shown himself to be ruthless in his ambition, intolerant of dissent, with a desire for control that has infiltrated almost every aspect of life in modern China.

He has gone from being primarily known as the husband of a celebrity singer to someone whose apparent charisma and aptitude for political storytelling have created a personality cult not seen since Mao’s day.

The colourful details of his early life have been rinsed and repackaged in official party lore, but the man himself — and what drives him — remain somewhat more of an enigma.  

“I dispute the conventional view that Xi Jinping struggles for power for power’s sake,” Alfred L. Chan, author of a book on Xi’s life, told AFP.

“I would suggest that he strives for power as an instrument… to fulfil his vision.”

Another biographer, Adrian Geiges, told AFP that he did not think Xi was motivated by a desire for personal enrichment, despite international media investigations having revealed his family’s amassed wealth.

“That’s not his interest,” Geiges said.

“He really has a vision about China, he wants to see China as the most powerful country in the world.”

Central to that vision — what Xi calls the “Chinese Dream” or “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” — is the role of the Communist Party (CCP). 

“Xi is a man of faith… for him, God is the Communist Party,” wrote Kerry Brown, author of “Xi: A Study in Power”. 

“The greatest mistake the rest of the world makes about Xi is to not take this faith seriously.”  

– ‘Traumatised’ – 

Xi might not seem an obvious candidate to become a CCP diehard, though he grew up as a “princeling”, or member of the party elite. 

His father Xi Zhongxun was a revolutionary hero turned vice premier, whose “strictness toward his family members was so serious that even those close to him believed it bordered on the inhuman”, according to the elder Xi’s biographer Joseph Torigian.

But when Zhongxun was purged by Mao and targeted during the Cultural Revolution, “(Jinping) and his family were traumatised”, said Chan. 

His status vanished overnight, and the family was split up. One of his half-sisters is reported to have killed herself because of the persecution.

Xi has said he was ostracised by his classmates, an experience the political scientist David Shambaugh suggests contributed to a “sense of emotional and psychological detachment and his autonomy from a very young age”.

At just 15, Xi was ordered to the countryside in central China where he spent years hauling grain and sleeping in cave homes. 

“The intensity of the labour shocked me,” he later said.

He also had to take part in “struggle sessions” in which he had to denounce his father. 

“Even if you don’t understand, you are forced to understand,” he said, describing the sessions to a Washington Post reporter “with a trace of bitterness” in a 1992 interview.

“It makes you mature earlier.”

Biographer Chan said the experiences of his youth had given him “toughness”.  

“He tends to go for broke. He tends to use a two-fisted approach when he approaches problems. But he also has a certain appreciation of the arbitrariness of power and that’s why he also emphasises law-based governance.”

– Systematic, low profile –

Nowadays, the cave Xi slept in is a domestic tourist draw, used to emphasise traits such as his concern for China’s poorest.

When AFP visited in 2016, one local painted a picture of an almost legendary figure, reading books between breaks in hard labour “so one could see he was no common man”.

That does not seem to have been obvious at the time though. Xi himself said he was not even rated “as high as the women” when he first arrived.

His application for CCP membership was rejected multiple times because of the family stigma, before it was finally accepted.

Beginning as a village party boss in 1974, Xi climbed to the governorship of coastal Fujian province in 1999, then party chief of Zhejiang province in 2002 and eventually Shanghai in 2007.

“He was working very systematically… to get experience by starting at a very low level, in a village, then in a prefecture… and so on,” said biographer Geiges.

“And he was very clever by keeping a low profile.”

Xi’s father was rehabilitated in the late 1970s following the death of Mao, massively boosting his son’s standing.

Following a divorce from his first wife, Xi married superstar soprano Peng Liyuan in 1987, at a time when she was much better known than him.

Even so, his potential was not apparent to all, exemplified by comments made by his host on a trip to the United States in 1985.

“No one in their right mind would ever think that that guy who stayed in my house would become the president,” Eleanor Dvorchak was quoted as saying years later in the New Yorker magazine.

Cai Xia, a former high-ranking CCP cadre who now lives in exile in the United States, believes Xi “suffers from an inferiority complex, knowing that he is poorly educated in comparison with other top CCP leaders”.

As a result, he is “thin-skinned, stubborn, and dictatorial”, she wrote in a recent article in Foreign Affairs.

– ‘Heir of the revolution’ –

But Xi has always regarded himself “as an heir of the revolution”, said Chan.

In 2007, he was appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body.

When he replaced Hu Jintao five years later, there was little in Xi’s past administrative record that foreshadowed his actions once installed as leader.

He has cracked down on civil society movements, independent media and academic freedoms, overseen alleged human rights abuses in the northwest Xinjiang region, and promoted a far more aggressive foreign policy than his predecessor.

In the absence of access to either Xi or any of his inner circle, scholars are left to survey his earlier writings and speeches for clues to his motivations.

“The absolute centrality of the party’s mission to make China a great country again is evident from Xi’s earliest recorded statements,” wrote Brown.

Xi has harnessed that narrative of an ascendant China to great effect, using nationalism as a tool for his own and the party’s legitimacy among the population. 

But there is also evidence he fears that grasp on power might decline.

“The fall of the Soviet Union and of socialism in eastern Europe was a big shock,” said Geiges, adding Xi blames the collapse on its political opening up. 

“So he decided that something like this shall not happen to China… that’s why he wants strong leadership of the Communist Party, with one strong leader.”

Posh-looking drivers in expensive cars are honking their horns on a beachfront avenue in Rio de Janeiro, blaring their approval at a vendor selling green-and-yellow Brazilian flags outside President Jair Bolsonaro’s former home.

Welcome to Barra da Tijuca, the neighborhood known as the “Brazilian Miami,” a bastion of support for the far-right incumbent as he fights to win reelection in his October 30 runoff battle against leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2010).

Known for its upscale shopping malls, gated communities and luxury condos with sweeping views of the emerald coastline, Barra voted heavily for Bolsonaro in the first-round election on October 2, when Lula took 48 percent of the vote nationwide, to 43 percent for the incumbent.

In Barra, Bolsonaro won 50 percent of the vote, to 37 percent for Lula — a preference visible in the abundance of Brazilian flags fluttering from the west-side neighborhood’s balconies, a symbol adopted by the president’s supporters.

“People here in Barra are very in sync with Bolsonaro ideologically. The majority of people support him, because there are a lot of businesspeople,” says resident Felipe Fontenelle, a 58-year-old entrepreneur who owns a communications security firm and stakes in two restaurants.

Lula, he warns, represents “communism.”

Developed in 1969 by renowned modernist urban planner Lucio Costa, Barra underwent a demographic boom in the 1980s, becoming a magnet for celebrities, politicians and the upwardly mobile as they sought a haven from the city’s violence.

Now home to some 135,000 people, its elite status was cemented when it was chosen as the site for the Olympic village for the 2016 Rio Games.

“It’s a neighborhood for the nouveau riche, especially people who believe in the idea of the self-made man: that they worked hard and succeeded,” says sociologist Paulo Gracino Junior of Candido Mendes University, calling it an enclave of executives, professionals and military top brass.

He points out it is also home to ex-cop Ronnie Lessa, a convicted arms trafficker who is the chief suspect in the 2018 killing of black LGBT activist and Rio city councillor Marielle Franco.

Lessa and Bolsonaro lived on the same street.

– Bolsonaro’s hood –

Bolsonaro, then a congressman representing Rio, moved to Barra with his family in the 2000s.

They still own the house they bought in Vivendas da Barra, a gated community that sits behind a cement wall topped with barbed wire.

The private condo has become a rallying point for Bolsonaro backers.

Visiting Rio from the southern state of Santa Catarina, retired lawyer Mirian Rebelo and her son Rodrigo, a dentist, stopped there to take selfies, both sporting Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts and sunglasses.

“I love the president’s focus on the family. And he doesn’t mince words. He speaks his mind,” says Mirian, 65.

“Every country deserves a Bolsonaro,” says Rodrigo, 41, praising the president’s “crackdown on corruption and the ideology of evil.”

Cacalo Matarazzo, a lawyer and jiu-jitsu teacher who lives next door to Bolsonaro’s condo complex, says he counts the president as a friend.

“Everyone here knows him well. He even invited me over for coffee before his inauguration” in 2019, says the stern, square-jawed 73-year-old, after proudly showing a series of photographs of himself with Bolsonaro on his cell phone.

“But it’s not just about Bolsonaro, it’s about a guy who’s fighting to build a better Brazil.”

Matarazzo is no fan of Lula, who makes a cameo among the Bolsonaro merch on sale out front.

There, the veteran leftist, who was jailed in 2018 on controversial, since-overturned corruption charges, appears in effigy as an inflatable doll in a prison uniform.

“Thief! Scum! Son of a bitch!” Matarazzo spits at the image of the former president.

North Korea on Friday fired a short-range ballistic missile, conducted an artillery barrage, and flew fighter jets close to the South’s border in another show of force that the US has warned could culminate in a nuclear test.

Pyongyang has dramatically ramped up missile launches and military exercises in recent weeks, which it now describes as “tactical nuke” drills, as Seoul and Washington say Kim Jong Un is close to conducting what would be his country’s seventh nuclear test.

North Korea’s military said in a rare statement its latest actions came in response to a “provocative” South Korean artillery exercise near the border.

The Korean People’s Army “took strong military countermeasures,” according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency early Friday.

Pyongyang issued “a stern warning to the South Korean military inciting military tension in the frontline area with reckless action,” said the statement.

South Korea’s military said it had detected the ballistic missile launch from the Sunan area in Pyongyang early Friday, just hours after Pyongyang flew 10 fighter jets close to the inter-Korean border.

The North Korean jets crossed a Seoul-set “reconnaissance line” which triggers an automatic operational response. Seoul then scrambled military aircraft, including F-35A fighter jets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

North Korea also fired some 170 artillery shots into waters off its east and west coasts, violating a maritime “buffer zone” agreed in a 2018 deal, JCS said.

Seoul’s National Security Council condemned what it described as a barrage of “hostile actions” overnight, warning in a statement that “such provocations will bring consequences”.

The South also imposed its first unilateral sanctions in five years Friday, targeting North Korean individuals and institutions.

The United States also condemned the launch of another ballistic missile, saying that it — like the many other recent launches — was in violation of multiple UN sanctions.

“We continue to seek serious and sustained dialogue with the DPRK, but the DPRK refuses to engage,” a State Department spokesperson said, referring to the North by its official name.

– New warning? –

Earlier this week, Kim Jong Un dismissed the idea of restarting talks over its banned weapons programmes, saying North Korea “felt no necessity to do so”.

The country revised its nuclear laws last month to allow preemptive strikes, with Kim declaring North Korea an “irreversible” nuclear power — effectively ending the possibility of negotiations over its arsenal.

Since then, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington have ramped up combined military exercises, including deploying a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier to the area twice, infuriating Pyongyang, which sees such drills as rehearsals for invasion.

“The North appeared to have taken the South’s recent artillery drill very seriously,” Hong Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification told AFP.

Their latest move — firing an artillery barrage into the maritime buffer zone but not into South Korean waters themselves — looks like an “attempt to test how Seoul will respond”, he said.

There have been growing calls from ruling party parliamentarians for South Korea’s new hawkish administration to scrap the 2018 agreement that created the maritime buffer zone.

“Last night’s drill could’ve been the North’s reaction in protest in North Korean style,” he added.

– Fears of nuclear test –

The overnight barrage follows the test firing of two long-range strategic cruise missiles on Wednesday, which itself came two days after the North said it had wrapped up two weeks of “tactical nuclear” drills.

Kim expressed “great satisfaction” with the recent tests, which he said showed the country’s nuclear combat forces were at “full preparedness for actual war”, state media reported.

With talks long stalled — and Ukraine-linked gridlock at the United Nations stymying fresh sanctions — Kim has doubled down on developing and testing his banned nuclear arsenal.

Officials in Seoul and Washington have been warning for months that Pyongyang is ready to conduct another nuclear test — which would be the country’s seventh.

Kim has said North Korea will “focus all efforts on the endless and accelerating development of the national nuclear combat armed forces”.

He made acquiring tactical nukes — smaller, lighter weapons designed for battlefield use — a top priority at a key party congress in January 2021.

About 1.4 million children under the age of five are suffering from malnutrition in South Sudan, caught in the grip of widespread flooding and intercommunal conflict, the British charity Save the Children said Friday.  

It said the world’s youngest country, which has a largely rural population, is reeling from “its worst hunger crisis” since independence from Sudan in 2011.

“The situation has deteriorated in recent months with more than 615,000 people impacted by an unprecedented fourth consecutive year of large-scale flooding, destroying homes, crops,” Save the Children said in a statement. 

Cases of malaria and snakebites are also soaring, it said, with children and women particularly hard hit.

The flooding coupled with a vicious cycle of often deadly interethnic conflict has uprooted thousands of people from their homes, the charity said, urging the international community to not “overlook South Sudan or to divert funding to other crises”.

Around 909,000 people have been affected by flooding across nine out of 10 states, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Tuesday. 

South Sudan, like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, has suffered from the fallout of the war in Ukraine which has sent global prices of food and fuel soaring.

The value of the local currency has also slumped by nearly 40 percent this year, Save the Children said.

The UN’s World Food Programme warned in March that more than 70 percent of South Sudan’s 11 million people would face extreme hunger this year because of natural disasters and violence.

Save the Children called on leaders planning to attend November’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt to increase funding to help vulnerable communities and children build resilience against climate disasters and shocks.

“The first generation of South Sudan children are growing up now and we must not fail them by allowing South Sudan to become a forgotten crisis,” said country director Jib Rabiltossaporn.

One of the poorest nations on the planet despite large oil reserves, South Sudan has lurched from crisis to crisis since independence, spending almost half of its life as a nation at war. 

Despite a rocket attack on Baghdad’s Green Zone, Iraqi lawmakers Thursday elected a new president who swiftly named a prime minister in hopes of ending a year of political gridlock and violence in the war-scarred nation.

Abdul Latif Rashid, a 78-year-old Iraqi Kurd, was elected as head of state, replacing Barham Saleh, by the assembly in the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone government and diplomatic district.

Rashid won more than 160 votes against 99 for the incumbent Saleh, an assembly official said.

The new president swiftly named Shiite politician Mohammed Shia al-Sudani as prime minister-designate, tasking him with reconciling feuding Shiite factions and forming a government a whole year after Iraq last went to the polls.

The 52-year-old Sudani, who has the backing of influential pro-Iran factions, vowed to form a government “as quickly as possible”, but faces the daunting task of winning over their rivals, the millions of diehard supporters of fiery cleric Moqtada Sadr.

When Sudani was first proposed in July, the move sparked mass protests by Sadr’s followers, who breached the Green Zone and stormed parliament.

He now has 30 days to form a new government capable of commanding a majority in parliament.

“I shall spare no effort to form a strong government,” Sudani said in a televised speech, vowing to work with “all political forces and elements of society”.

He also promised the youth he would confront problems such as “the lack of (public) services, poverty, inflation and unemployment”.

Western governments swiftly welcomed the move to end Iraq’s political standoff.

The US State Department called on the new leaders to “bear in mind the will of the Iraqi people” and urged all sides “to refrain from violence and to resolve differences amicably and peacefully through the political process.”

The French embassy congratulated Sudani on his nomination and called for the “formation of a government that will do all in its power to answer the legitimate demands of all Iraqi people and especially its youth.”

A reminder of Iraq’s troubles came earlier in the day as lawmakers headed into parliament, when a barrage of nine Katyusha-style rockets rained down on the area, the security forces said.

At least 10 people were wounded, including six members of the security forces or bodyguards of lawmakers, as well as four civilians in a nearby district, a security official told AFP.

US ambassador Alina Romanowski condemned the attack “in the strongest terms” on Twitter and warned that “the people of Iraq must resolve their political differences & grievances solely thru peaceful means. 

“Attacks like these undermine democracy & trap Iraq in a perpetual cycle of violence.”

– ‘Crisis breeds instability’ –

The democratic institutions built in oil-rich Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein remain fragile, and neighbouring Iran wields major influence.

For just over a year now, Iraq has had only a caretaker government to tackle an array of pressing problems, including unemployment, decaying infrastructure, corruption and the impacts of climate change.

The United Nations mission in Iraq warned this week that “the protracted crisis is breeding further instability” and that the divisive politics are “generating bitter public disillusion”.

Lawmakers had made three previous attempts to elect a new head of state, in February and March, but failed to even reach the required two-thirds threshold for a quorum.

Under Iraq’s post-Saddam power-sharing system, meant to avoid more sectarian conflict, the president by convention is Kurdish, the prime minister a Shiite Arab and the parliament speaker a Sunni Arab.

The presidency has usually been held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Rashid and Saleh. This year the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) had demanded the presidency but ultimately abandoned the bid.

Rashid, a hydraulic engineer versed in environmental issues, is seen as a compromise candidate for the polarised country.

Iraq’s rival Shiite political factions, the most powerful players, have been bitterly vying for influence.

Sadr has pushed for parliament to be dissolved to clear the way for fresh elections, while the rival Coordination Framework, to which the prime minister-designate belongs, insisted that a new government be formed first.

The standoff has seen both sides set up protest camps in the Green Zone this year. 

Tensions boiled over on August 29 when more than 30 Sadr supporters were killed in battles with Iran-backed factions and the army.

Political analyst Ali al-Baidar said he could not rule out an escalation between the opposing sides but said he thought it more likely that a backroom deal had been done under which the Sadrists will receive additional cabinet posts in return for their tacit approval of Sudani’s nomination.