Xi Hides Ma Xingrui’s Rebellion? Xi’s Anti-Corruption Fuels Black Info Market

700 words. That is the length of the corruption indictment against Ma Xingrui. The longest ever issued in Xi Jinping's tiger-hunting campaign. Yet the more Xi writes about graft, the more he obscures the real story. At the same time, a bizarre black market for information is flourishing inside the system itself. Officials are leaking tips about who is next to fall and profiting from them, turning the And in Washington, Trump has suddenly gone public with allegations that Beijing interfered in the 2020 U.S. election, a card kept hidden for years, now played at this precise moment. Why? Is Xi hiding Ma Xingrui's real crimes? Secret police now two-thirds the size of China's police force. Recently, Ma Xingrui, a close ally of Xi Jinping, was formally convicted of corruption. Several overseas media outlets noted that Chinese state media devoted more than 700 Chinese characters to describing Ma's alleged embezzlement and bribery, the longest account published for any official who has fallen from power. Commenting on the case, Yuan Hongbing said, First of all, what is the greatest political crisis Xi Jinping faces today? Even within the bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian regime, he has become isolated, betrayed, and abandoned by those around him. He now relies on the largest secret police apparatus in human history, together with one brutal Stalin-style purge after another, to preserve his personal dictatorship. At present, the number of personnel serving under the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the National Supervisory Commission, and the police units carrying out Xi's orders is equivalent to two-thirds of China's entire public security system. Since the CCP's 20th National Congress, the so-called Xi faction cultivated by Xi Jinping has shown signs of rebellion across almost the entire system, from Li Shanfu and Wei Fenghe, to Miao Hua and He Weidong, and then Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli, and Ma Xingrui. The fundamental reason these members of Xi's faction were purged was not their alleged embezzlement or bribery. Under the CCP's present authoritarian system, virtually no official is clean, and no bureaucrat is free of corruption. Graft and bribery have become a normal way of life for party officials. The real reason Xi Jinping turned the blade inward and ruthlessly moved against members of his own faction was that he had discovered they were not absolutely loyal to him politically. This disloyalty manifested itself in two main ways. First, almost all officials associated with the Xi faction opposed Xi Jinping's strategic thinking, namely, his plan to consolidate his status as a communist emperor by launching a war in the Taiwan Strait. They believed that such a war would carry an extremely high risk of failure. Second, nearly all members of the Xi faction displayed the duplicity of two-faced political operators. In Xi's presence, they did not openly oppose his strategy of launching a war over Taiwan. Behind his back, however, they were preparing for the possibility that Xi might start such a war, suffer defeat, and leave them to determine how the political order would be controlled in the post-Xi era. Recently disclosed information also helps explain why so many CCP officials abuse their power to embezzle funds, accept bribes, and accumulate fortunes of almost unimaginable proportions. Their primary goal is no longer personal luxury, because individual indulgence does not require wealth on such an enormous scale. They accumulate these fortunes for political purposes. As Wang Qishan once reportedly told his secretary, with 100 million, we could establish a militia division. With 1 billion, we could build an army of 100,000. With 10 billion, we could create a force of 1 million. This is the shared political motive of corrupt officials, including Ma Xingri. Whether Ma Xingri committed the alleged offense of political rebellion cannot yet be independently verified. What is clear, however, is that his downfall was unlikely to have been caused by corruption alone, and Xi Jinping now finds himself surrounded by fewer and fewer people he can truly trust. CCP insiders profit from Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign. On July 17, 2026, China Comment, a magazine affiliated with Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese Communist Party's state media organization, published an article revealing that some self-media accounts in mainland China had been predicting the imminent downfall of CCP officials by posting their resumes, using homophonic code words, and employing other cryptic methods. The information was reportedly supplied by civil servants working inside the These individuals would obtain internal information about officials who were about to be investigated, removed, or transferred, then sell it through multiple layers of intermediaries in online groups. This gradually gave rise to a covert chain of black and gray market businesses. On the surface, such posts appeared to be little more than compilations of publicly available information. However, those publishing them would convey additional clues through the timing of the posts, unusual wording, or other indirect expressions. For example, on July 6, 2025, a WeChat public account in mainland China posted a detailed resume of Zhou Shanwang, a former member of the Party Leadership Group and former vice chairman of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Two days later, on July 8, the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission announced that Zhou had fallen from power and was under investigation. The phenomenon is not limited to predicting which officials are about to be purged. Some accounts also publish sensationalized material after an official's downfall in order to attract attention. China Comment reported that after a female department level official in Guiyang was removed from office, a WeChat public account published articles with headlines claiming that three female officials in the city were involved in keeping male escorts. The articles used vulgar content to fabricate connections and exaggerate stories about them. Once information about the downfall of CCP officials is leaked, it is circulated through chat groups on various messaging platforms. New members are required to pay a fee to join. After obtaining the information, some public account operators repost it on their own channels, use the resulting traffic to attract followers, and then create additional paid groups. An investigator said, behind every public account, there are usually three or four chat groups. Entry fees for the basic groups are relatively low, often only a few dozen yuan. Membership in newer or more exclusive groups is more expensive, with some charging as much as 399 yuan. During the investigation, authorities discovered a large number of such chat groups. Group administrators frequently moved members to new groups or shut existing ones down, using guerrilla-style tactics to evade monitoring. Analysis As the information black market booms, where does the truth really lie? Commenting on the issue, Zhang Ping, a current affairs commentator with Vision Times, said that the revelation itself amounts to a slap in the face for Xi Jinping. For years, Xi has repeatedly proclaimed that officials must be made unable to be corrupt, unwilling to be corrupt, and afraid to be corrupt. Yet this report vividly demonstrates that Xi Jinping's so-called anti-corruption campaign has, in practice, failed across the board. Officials remain willing, able, and unafraid to engage in corruption. Worse still, they are enriching themselves in the very way most likely to infuriate Xi by profiting from his own anti-corruption campaign. The greatest irony is that these officials have effectively created a black market for information. This market exists precisely because the Chinese Communist Party tightly controls and suppresses information. That is also why Xi's government has reacted so angrily. These officials are openly defying him. Moreover, the more determined Xi is to keep certain information from the public, the rarer and more valuable that information becomes on the black market, and the more profit it can generate for the officials selling it. Xi Jinping added that there is another revealing point. The CCP has effectively acknowledged that this information black market produces the most accurate and earliest predictions, because all of its information originates from within the party system itself. In doing so, the CCP has inadvertently given the black market its own public seal of credibility. Why is Trump exposing Beijing's 2020 election interference now? CCP officials inside China steal information and leak it online for profit, but their activities do not stop there. On July 16, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a nationally televised address during primetime on Thursday evening. Trump explicitly accused Beijing of interfering in the 2020 presidential election and stealing the data of 220 million American voters. He emphasized, Without fair and honest elections, no country can be great. Commenting on the issue, Yuan Hongbin said, In reality, the Chinese Communist Party's interference in U.S. elections is an indisputable fact. I believe the U.S. government has long had a deep and clear understanding of this reality. People may remember that, for more than two decades before Trump's first term, left-wing politicians in the United States and Europe consistently pursued a policy of appeasement toward the CCP's authoritarian regime, allowing the threat it posed to grow unchecked. This created favorable international political conditions for the regime's economy to expand at extraordinary speed. By exploiting unfair competitive practices, it rapidly became the world's second-largest economy. During this process, international capital also formed an unholy alliance of mutual benefit with the tens of millions of corrupt officials operating under the CCP regime. When Hu Jintao visited the United States, President Barack Obama even joined him in declaring that the CCP regime and the United States had established a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership. When Trump unexpectedly came to power in his first term, he reversed the trend. To a considerable extent, he brought international appeasement of the CCP regime to a halt. The global tide of tolerating and accommodating the regime began to recede. Some officials during Trump's first term, including Mike Pompeo, also recognized with exceptional clarity that the CCP regime represented the greatest threat facing human civilization in the 21st century. Because Trump's first administration ended more than two decades of appeasement toward the CCP regime, the regime developed an intense hatred of him. But why did Trump not expose this CCP political conspiracy earlier? When Trump visited Beijing in April of this year, he repeatedly referred to Xi Jinping as a good friend and described him as a great leader. The reason was that, after the outbreak of the war with Iran, the Trump administration temporarily expected the CCP regime to withdraw its comprehensive support for Iran. It even hoped that Xi Jinping could restrain or persuade Iran to accept a series of US military objectives. However, the facts proved that trying to negotiate with the CCP regime in this way was like asking a tiger for its skin. It was a serious mistake. Only after learning this extremely harsh lesson did Trump publicly disclose what the US government had, in fact, known for a long time. That the CCP regime had comprehensively interfered in American political elections and attempted to manipulate them, thereby seriously undermining US national sovereignty. They mobilized the full power of the state in an attempt to prevent Trump from being re-elected. What do you think of this move? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for watching and see you next time.