The third member since 2022 to be expelled from the CCP Politburo, Ma Xingrui, is charged with more than just corruption (which can mean graft, disloyalty to Xi Jinping, or both). He is also being hit with “sex charges.” Yet his worst crimes seem to have contributed nothing to his fall from grace (The New York Times, July 14, 2026).
Mr. Ma’s expulsion represents a downfall from the highest echelons of power in China. For many years he was one of the country’s most promising political elites, making his mark as an engineer and scientist….
Mr. Ma, 66, is accused of improperly accepting money and other gifts, helping relatives to buy homes at discounted prices, as well as participating in “power-for-sex and money-for-sex transactions,” according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s anti-corruption watchdog.
He also was found to have “illegally accepted huge sums of money and property” through relatives and associates, the announcement said, without going into specifics….
[After leading the space program, Ma] rose through the ranks of politics to oversee the far western region of Xinjiang, where Western officials and human rights groups have said China used state-sponsored labor programs to coerce Uyghurs and other minorities into factory work. In 2022, during his tenure, a deadly fire in the capital city of Urumqi set off protests across the country over the strict pandemic policies that had hampered rescue efforts.
Weeks after the protests, which were seen as the biggest public challenge to Mr. Xi’s leadership, the government dismantled its harsh zero-Covid policies.
Ma’s governance of Xinjiang from 2021 to 2025 is missing from the Party’s bill of indictment.
As many as 1.8 million members of Muslim minorities and others were detained in reeducation camps after the camp system was inaugurated in 2014.
After 2019, the Chinese Communist Party reportedly closed some of the camps. The Party then transferred many detainees to other prisons or subjected them to forced labor.
Forced labor
According to research by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and others, a half a million or more Muslims of Xinjiang are still being incarcerated.
But formal incarceration is only part of the picture. Estimates of the total number currently subjected to forced labor in or out of a formal prison setting range from hundreds of thousand to 2.5 million. The provider of the latter estimate, Adrian Zenz, argues in a 2025 paper that although the “camp-to-labor policy likely ended in late 2019 when many lower-security camps were closed…most released detainees likely remain in forced labor.”
Perhaps Ma was not so avid a brute as Party Secretary of Xinjiang as his predecessor, Chen Quanguo, who had worked to expand the camp system. But if this is true, it doesn’t earn Ma any commendation. When he was running Xinjiang, did he release every Muslim who had been incarcerated solely for being a Muslim? Did he end forced labor?
Of course, had Ma tried to do these things, he would have quickly lost his job as the top CCP official in Xinjiang. But he kept it for several years. Purge him for that.
Also see:
ICIJ: “Beijing’s backtrack on Xinjiang detention camps spurred by ICIJ investigation, research finds” (February 4, 2026)
“Reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists helped force a shift in Beijing’s public stance on Xinjiang, according to new academic research—from denying the existence of a vast detention camp system to justifying it and, eventually, to partially dismantling it…. Without sustained international scrutiny—and without reporting efforts like those led by ICIJ—the camp system in its original form might have continued well beyond 2020.”
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: “Eight Years On, China’s Repression of the Uyghurs Remains Dire: How China’s Policies in the Uyghur Region Have and Have Not Changed” (February 2025)
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: “Forced Labor in Xinjiang: New Evidence, Current State, and Proposed Countermeasures” (March 2025)
The New York Times: “ ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims” (November 16, 2019)
“More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.”
