Why do so many Chinese officials fall for fake promises of political charlatans?

A man from a modest background and in possession of no remarkable skills managed to amass a staggering fortune over two decades, as well as the respect of top Communist Party officials in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan.

All Su Hongbo had to do was brag about his Beijing connections and package himself as someone who could make things happen. The charade ended in 2020, when he was revealed as a conman and later convicted on corruption charges.

To the party’s corruption fighters, Su was as a typical “political charlatan” – an impostor who fakes ties with high-level officials for gain – and was accused of “seriously polluting and damaging the political ecology”.

Since then, the term “political charlatan” has turned up in numerous transcripts of investigations into officials who, despite their knowledge of the internal workings of the party system, were fooled by businesspeople who took advantage of their ambitions.

The scale of the problem meant that when the party’s all-important third plenary session vowed in July to continue President Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption campaign, political charlatans were named as a target.

It echoed Xi’s message at the past two annual plenary meetings of the Central Commission of Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party’s anti-corruption watchdog, when he called on cadres to “persistently purify the political environment”.

At this year’s meeting in January, Xi said there was a need “to crack down on various political charlatans and strictly prevent the principles of commercial exchange from infiltrating the party”.