CCP Officials’ Corruption Involved More Than 1 Trillion Yuan in 2025, Insider Says

The Chinese communist regime’s latest internal report has shown that the value of corruption cases uncovered within the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2025 reached a historic high, exceeding 1 trillion yuan (approximately $145 billion), according to an insider with close ties to the CCP system.

Li Yu, who used a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times that for 2025, the internally confirmed total amount of money involved in the CCP officials’ corruption, bribery, buying and selling of official posts, and other illicit gains stands at a staggering 800 billion yuan ($115.74 billion), with an additional 300 billion-plus yuan ($43.4 billion) of corruption money still in the process of being recovered, according to the CCP’s latest internal report.

Since last year, the CCP has launched a “post-retirement departure review” targeting retired officials, Li said. The investigations have not only dredged up long-buried corruption scandals, but also exposed the staggering hidden wealth concealed behind this group of retired officials—including a vast number of undisclosed real estate holdings and massive, clandestine overseas deposits, according to Li.

Even more shocking was the chain reaction of the investigation, Li said.

“Investigations into incumbent corrupt officials exposed other related officials who were corrupt but not the targets of the investigations—a group whose number actually exceeded that of the targeted officials by more than 60 percent!” Li said.

“The real estate assets of these corrupt officials were largely held in trust by relatives and friends, while they maintained substantial secret deposits in banks located in Hong Kong, the UK, and Australia.”

Pervasive Corruption

The Chinese regime punished 69 officials at the level of minister or provincial rank and above last year for corruption amid an ongoing crackdown, according to a statement released on Jan. 17 by the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission. More than 1 million corruption cases were investigated in 2025.

Among those punished for corruption in 2025, approximately 4,155 officials were at the bureau-director level, 293,000 officials were at or below the division level, and 686,000 other personnel included those from rural areas and enterprises, according to the statement.

Judging by both the official CCP data and the internal report, the structure of corruption in 2025 exhibits distinct hierarchical characteristics, Zhao, a political analyst in China who gave only his last name out of fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times.

There were more than 4,200 corrupt officials at the bureau level and above, involving a corresponding sum of roughly 225 billion yuan ($32.55 billion), he said.

“This demonstrates a distinct pattern of financial assets being concentrated at the highest echelons,” he said.

Zhao said that among last year’s record-high amount of corruption money, the massive state-owned financial and defense industrial enterprises occupied a large portion.

On March 25, the city of Dalian’s Intermediate People’s Court found Tan Ruisong, former chairman of the Aviation Industry Corp. of China, a major state-owned defense company, guilty of having accepted bribes totaling 613 million yuan ($88.69 million) and embezzling nearly 90 million yuan ($13.02 million) in addition to engaging in insider trading and the unauthorized disclosure of information, according to mainland Chinese media reports.

Chen, a military scholar in China who gave only his last name out of fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times that China’s defense industrial enterprises handle the country’s major projects and that the concentration of funds and approval authority is extremely high.

“Consequently, in the absence of external oversight, power can easily be transformed into a conduit for long-term, covert personal gain,” he said. “As the Tan Ruisong case demonstrates, corruption is not a short-term phenomenon, but rather the result of a continuous accumulation process occurring within the institutional framework.”

Zhao said of the scale of the CCP’s corruption, “This is, in essence, a systematic campaign of illicit spoils-sharing—the norm of ‘monetizing power’ within the CCP system.”

“Every single penny represents the most extreme form of extraction from the public’s hard-earned wealth,” he said. “Moreover, it serves as the fuel that sustains ‘political loyalty’ within the CCP’s system. Unless the old networks of corruption are dismantled, the newcomers will have no share of the spoils.”

Yue Li contributed to this report.