Xi Xiaoming, vice-president of China's Supreme People's Court, became the first person at that institution to be ensnared by the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection — the body responsible for what Beijing calls tiger hunting, and what everyone else calls selective anti-corruption enforcement. His investigation marks a notable escalation in a judicial cleanup campaign that has previously targeted lower-ranking officials but has now reached the apex of the civilian court system.

The irony of the country's highest judicial authority requiring external party discipline to police its own vice-president apparently struck no one in an official capacity as worth commenting on publicly. Observers expressed cautious hope that the investigation signals a genuine reckoning with judicial corruption, while simultaneously noting that anti-graft campaigns in one-party states have a documented habit of targeting rivals as effectively as they target the corrupt — a distinction that tends to blur in practice.