Investigations against leading propaganda officials

In only the second case since the end of 2022 of a corruption investigation against a permanent official at the provincial level, Zhang Jianchun (张建春), a deputy minister in the CCP’s powerful Central Propaganda Department, was accused on Friday of “serious violations of discipline and law” – a sign that a corruption investigation is underway.

The decision was announced on the website of China’s main anti-corruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, but no details of the alleged crimes were given. The news was widely reported in Chinese-language media abroad, including Taiwan’s United Daily News and RFI.

Zhang, 59, has had a long career in the CCP’s Organization Department, the body that essentially acts as the party’s personnel center, arranging official appointments and staff assignments. He was briefly promoted to deputy minister of the department in November 2018 before being transferred to the Central Propaganda Department (CPD) in 2020.

According to official sources, a meeting was held at the Central Propaganda Department on Friday evening, where Propaganda Minister Li Shulei (李書磊) stressed the seriousness of the allegations against Zhang. A brief press release on the meeting simply said that “comrades at the meeting unanimously expressed their support for the CPC Central Committee’s decision to conduct a disciplinary review and supervisory investigation into Zhang Jianchun’s alleged serious disciplinary violations.”

As a vice minister primarily in charge of the news and publishing sector, Zhang appeared in public in a largely ceremonial capacity. Following the 2022 Communist Party of China National Congress, he chaired a gathering of publishers to stress the importance of publishing educational materials on Xi Jinping’s political record. The previous month, he had chaired a gathering of party-run newspaper publishers, where he simply stressed the importance of adhering to the leadership of “Comrade Xi Jinping as the core.”

Before the news of his downfall, Zhang Jianchun had not appeared in public for two months. On April 17, he met with visiting director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kathi Vidal. His last appearance was on April 23, when he participated in a youth reading forum.

Zhang is only the second best provincial, or Subscribe to (省部级), an official who has been “dropped” (落马) – “dropped” is Chinese’s flowery term for being fired for corruption – since the 20th CPC National Congress in October 2022. He is the first high-ranking official from China’s propaganda system to fall from grace since the arrest of Lu Wei (鲁炜), China’s flamboyant first czar of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in 2017. Like Zhang, a deputy minister of the CPD, Lu was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2019.