Wiping out Black and Evil Forces - Understanding China’s campaign to combat criminal syndicates

This thesis examines China’s campaign, Wiping out Black and Evil Forces (扫黑除恶,
hereafter WBEF) to analyze its relationship with the long-existing Anti-Corruption campaign. First, WBEF was launched for both preemptive and preventive reasons. Second, because of WBEF’s bottom-up strategy design and rhetorical ambiguity, WBEF can capture lower-level officials and law enforcement personnel who eluded the net of the Anti-Corruption campaign. Third, local officials and the police both play dual roles as regulators and perpetrators, which undermine campaign legitimacy and efficacy. Based on 239 cases from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China, the thesis elucidates the number of WBEF members indicted per court case, their misconducts, and social backgrounds. The thesis explores the implementation process by analyzing the operational structure of the campaign, which involves the police and the WBEF leadership teams at each level of administration. Lastly, the thesis makes the observation that Beijing’s campaign design is either extremely centralized or overly local. The former results in insufficient coverage at lower-level localities, whereas the latter leads to opaqueness in local operations.