After nine months of anticipation, the fate of Ma Xingrui, a onetime high-flyer in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is finally clear. On April 3, Chinese authorities announced that Ma, a member of the Politburo and deputy head of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, was under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervision Commission for suspected serious violations of discipline and law.

When Ma was transferred out of his role as party secretary of Xinjiang last July, the official line was only that he had been given “another assignment.” No new post was announced, and no explanation was provided. Looking back now, that long period of suspension was itself a signal. For anyone familiar with the workings of the CCP’s upper ranks, what matters most about the Ma case is not simply that another senior official has fallen. It is that it has finally broken a boundary that had long been faintly visible but never clearly crossed—going after incumbent Politburo members, the 24-person council that is China’s second-highest leadership team, after the smaller Standing Committee.

After nine months of anticipation, the fate of Ma Xingrui, a onetime high-flyer in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is finally clear. On April 3, Chinese authorities announced that Ma, a member of the Politburo and deputy head of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, was under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervision Commission for suspected serious violations of discipline and law.

When Ma was transferred out of his role as party secretary of Xinjiang last July, the official line was only that he had been given “another assignment.” No new post was announced, and no explanation was provided. Looking back now, that long period of suspension was itself a signal. For anyone familiar with the workings of the CCP’s upper ranks, what matters most about the Ma case is not simply that another senior official has fallen. It is that it has finally broken a boundary that had long been faintly visible but never clearly crossed—going after incumbent Politburo members, the 24-person council that is China’s second-highest leadership team, after the smaller Standing Committee.

Technically, this unspoken rule had been broken already, when military leaders He Weidong and Zhang Youxia were toppled over the course of the last year. But military power is often an exception, given the sensitivity of the need for party control of the army. Going after Ma, a standard civilian party-state Politburo member, is very different.

The reason given for Ma’s fall is corruption—but the real offense may have been different. Judging by official statements and the framing of party media, the real offense of He, Zhang, and Ma may really have been trespassing against Xi’s ultimate authority. The military purges have been accompanied by a push to assert the superiority of party control but in Ma’s case stemmed from his lack of discipline over his own networks of graft.

It has been widely rumored that Ma’s wife used her husband’s contacts to issue insurance policies from Hong Kong and other offshore jurisdictions to the wives and children of many leading officials—some worth tens of millions of yuan. The scale of those allegedly involved, and the breadth of the network, is said to be staggering. If the claims are true, Ma must have known—and by acquiescing in it, he was likely trying to bind many senior leaders’ families to himself, forming an alliance of interests that would serve as a layer of political protection.

The 20th Politburo is, by and large, filled with Xi’s own people. Yet even within Xi’s camp, there is a distinction between the core and the periphery, and competition among them is intense. Ma belonged to the periphery and was generally regarded as a leading figure in what is known as the Shandong clique, supposedly headed by Peng Liyuan, Xi’s wife and a Shandong province native.

Ma’s career was thus blessed by Peng’s patronage, not Xi’s directly. That made him an outsider candidate for rising to the very top, the Standing Committee, at the 21st Party Congress next year. That meant he had to find other ways of ingratiating himself, such as the insurance policy scam.

But Xi strongly dislikes subordinates engaging in small maneuvers behind his back and forming even loose factions. It’s possible that Ma blundered, then, when Xi started to see him as angling for power this way. The involvement of a highly sensitive figure such as Peng would explain why his fall took a relatively long time; having the case drag on for nine months suggests some hesitancy on Xi’s part.

What increasingly determines whether a senior official will be openly dealt with is not how much he has taken but whether he has used corruption to build relationship networks, chains of interests, and layers of protection—whether he has woven horizontal ties within the elite that could, in some measure, slip free of the supreme core’s control. In other words, corruption is only the entry point. Politics is where the matter ends up.

If Xi wants the elite, and especially his own followers, to understand that the rules of survival have changed—that even attaching oneself to him does not guarantee political safety and that one can still be purged—then the best way is to make an example of one of his own. Among these three cases, Ma’s is more useful than those of He and Zhang. Because of the military background of the latter two, some may still have harbored the illusion that even if they too formed factions, Xi might not necessarily move against them publicly.

Ma is different. If he is dealt with severely, the shock to Xi’s followers—especially those on the outer edge of his camp—will be far greater. For them, even the protective coloring of Peng, even being seen as one of Xi’s own people, is no guarantee of safety. Anyone can fall if they cross Xi’s perceived lines, no matter how high-ranking or how connected they are.

In the past, the assumption was that once you made it to the top, you were more or less secure. That logic is now failing. Xi’s followers too will become stratified. The innermost handful may still be safe. Outer circle followers, by contrast, will feel increasingly vulnerable—and replaceable.

To ensure their political safety, each person will have to rely ever more on a single line of loyalty to Xi himself, rather than cultivating networks of interest with other senior figures at the same time. This will further strengthen his authority. But it will also make the elite increasingly unable to form meaningful collective governance and leave top-level politics more rigid and more fragile than ever.

© Foreign Policy