Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Another Chinese Politburo member faces official investigation, Taiwan’s opposition leader visits China, and a Chinese researcher dies under suspicious circumstances at a U.S. university.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Another Chinese Politburo member faces official investigation, Taiwan’s opposition leader visits China, and a Chinese researcher dies under suspicious circumstances at a U.S. university.

Xi’s Purge Targets Politburo Member

Ma Xingrui, a former high-flying technocrat and Xinjiang party secretary, is officially under investigation for corruption charges. That makes him the third member of the current Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo to fall amid President Xi Jinping’s latest purge, as well as the first civilian member.

There are two likely reasons for Ma’s targeting. The first is that Ma was exceptionally capable. He handled politically sensitive assignments in Xinjiang and earlier in Guangdong and the city of Shenzhen with skill and ruthlessness. As I noted in last week’s China Brief, Xi tends to find that kind of talent and ambition threatening.

Second, it’s possible that Ma’s background leading China’s space agencies connected him to the corruption being probed within the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. However, Ma left the aerospace sector in 2013, before the Second Artillery Corps was reorganized into the Rocket Force and received the surge of funding and authority that enabled such corruption.

Ma’s time in Xinjiang certainly offered opportunities for large-scale graft, from the expropriation of Uyghur property and businesses to the notoriously corrupt paramilitary organization that runs much of the region’s industry, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.

Whatever the reason, Ma now finds himself facing down a bleak process of interrogation and punishment, and his former status offers him only a little protection.

What happens once a purge target such as Ma is formally........

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