On July 8, the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission announced that it has set up an office that, over the next three months, will launch “rectification work” [Editor’s note: a political shakeup] in a number of pilot cities nationwide. The pilot plan will then be rolled out to the entire country. The goal is to finish it prior to Party’s 20th session in 2022. On the same day, the Central Party School held a seminar specifically to mobilize party members to study the “Yan’an Rectification” in the 1940s. The Central Party School emphasized that “the Yan’an Rectification started with ideological education, focused on solving fundamental ideological problems, and then achieved unprecedented unity among the party members.” On July 9, the Ministry of Public Security announced that it will spend the next year and a half on the “rectification work” within its organs and eliminate the influence of people like Zhou Yongkang and those who engage in forming their own interest groups.
According to the quoted comments in the article that Radio Free Asia published, people are speculating that, similar to the Great Purge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the “rectification work” is for Xi Jinping to clean out those who hold different opinions and get ready for personnel shakeups that will occur after the party’s 20th session in 2022. Xi will then develop a political system that he can trust.
An article that Beijing Youth Daily published stated that the main task of the “educational rectification” movement in the political and legal system is to eliminate the leading bad influences. It emphasized that justice is the last line of defense for social justice and the actions of the political and legal teams have a direct impact on the public.
Source: Radio Free Asia, July 10, 2020
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/zhengzhi/gf-07102020083122.html