BEIJING — Even as China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, talks about rooting out corrupt officials, he has simultaneously launched a serious crackdown on citizens daring to raise the same subject in public.
At least 16 activists have been arrested or detained since banners were unfurled in Beijing in March and April demanding that officials ‘‘publicly disclose assets.’’ The arrest last week of prominent activist Xu Zhiyong heightened the sense of despair among leading liberals about China’s new leadership and prompted open letters of protest.
The crackdown dramatically illustrates the Chinese leadership’s paranoia about street protests. The government seems haunted by memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and the Arab Spring.
It also signals that any moves to crack down on corruption will be on Xi’s and the Communist Party’s own terms.
‘‘From the ruling party point of view, they think anticorruption is an internal affair — citizens have no right to judge them, they are fighting corruption on their own,’’ said lawyer Liang Xiaojun, who is representing one of the arrested activists. ‘‘But the one-party system has never been good at fighting corruption on its own. The contradictions just get increasingly sharpened.’’
President Xi’s moves to battle corruption have so far been largely symbolic, with a ban on lavish displays of wealth, such as the alcohol-fueled banquets that had been one of the hallmarks of Communist Party rule in recent years. In an apparent bid to soften popular resentment, Xi has pledged to catch the ‘‘tigers’’ as well as the ‘‘flies’’ responsible for stealing public money; some senior officials have been removed from office.
On Tuesday, China issued a directive banning the construction of government buildings for the next five years. Central authorities have periodically tried to rein in the widely mocked penchant among local officials for grand offices.
A few of these projects have been slowed or stopped, including the nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters started by a local government several years ago in an impoverished corner of Anhui province.
But Tuesday’s joint directive by China’s Cabinet and the Chinese Communist Party went much further — it also banned a long list of strategies that local leaders have used to circumvent more informal efforts.
The prosecutions of individual officials, however, have not convinced many Chinese people that the system is interested in cleaning house, observers say.
Replacing officials won’t change anything, said one commentator on the microblogging site Weibo, in a post that was widely circulated but has since been deleted. ‘‘The meat has always gone bad in the fridge,’’ the post said. ‘‘Should we change the meat or the fridge? What do you say?’’
Material from The New York Times was used in this report.