Tian Xuebin’s detention marks the opening salvo of 2026 as Xi Jinping tightens the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed a veteran official of the powerful State Council under investigation for corruption, the first high-profile case of 2026 as CCP leader Xi Jinping’s more-than-a-decade-long anti-corruption campaign continues.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the Party’s top disciplinary and anti-graft body, announced on Jan. 5 that Tian Xuebin, 62, had been detained for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law.”
Tian most recently served as vice minister of Water Resources, a post he left in December 2023. His detention makes him the first high-level official—known in Chinese political parlance as a “tiger”—to fall in 2026.
Tian spent much of his career within the CCP’s elite administrative apparatus. Beginning in the 1990s, he served for more than a decade in the General Office of the CCP Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council, the two bodies that act as the nerve centers of Party and government bureaucracies.
At the State Council, Tian worked under several premiers, including the late Li Keqiang, who served as Xi’s nominal second-in-command until 2023 and died of a sudden heart attack that year. Tian became vice minister of Water Resources in 2015 and remained in that post until his retirement.
The announcement of Tian’s investigation came just a day after the CCDI reported it had completed investigations into four other senior figures: Zhou Xianwang, the mayor of Wuhan when COVID-19 first broke out in the city; Xu Chuanzhi, a former top disciplinary inspector; Liu Shaoyong, former chairman of China Eastern Airlines; and Feng Zhibin, former deputy general manager of state-owned conglomerate Sinochem Group.
All four have been expelled from the Party and will be transferred to judicial authorities for prosecution, the CCDI said.
The CCDI concluded 2025 by detaining a record number of 65 high-ranking officials, according to the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily. In a Jan. 3 front-page editorial, the paper praised Xi’s anti-corruption drive and vowed that the Party would maintain a “high-pressure stance against corruption” with standards expected to “grow stricter as time goes on.”
“No one should harbor any hopes of getting lucky or cling to illusions, and even less should anyone have the mistaken expectation that enforcement will be toned down or softened,” it said.
By Bill Pan
