China has launched a year-long nationwide campaign against organized crime beginning in July, with one landmark shift: for the first time, so-called "internet water armies" — coordinated networks that manipulate online public opinion for hire — have been officially classified as a form of organized criminal activity.
The initiative, framed as a "Deepened Specialized Campaign Against Organized Crime," represents a significant escalation beyond the routine anti-crime enforcement Beijing has maintained since 2021. Officials say organized crime has evolved, moving from physical violence to what they call "soft violence" — a category that encompasses online harassment, phone-bombing, coordinated cyberbullying, public-opinion manipulation, and malicious reporting systems. Standard governance tools, they argue, are no longer adequate.
From Village Tyrants to Digital Manipulation Networks
The original anti-crime sweep, conducted between 2018 and 2020, targeted largely physical criminal hierarchies — the so-called "village tyrants" who dominated rural land deals, manipulated local elections, and controlled community resources through intimidation. That campaign dismantled more than 1,200 rural organized crime groups, punished over 3,700 village-level enforcers, and purged more than 40,000 village cadres found to have ties to criminal networks.
The new campaign carries forward those traditional targets — gambling syndicates, drug networks, illegal mining operations, and those who exploit minors — while extending the definition of organized crime into digital terrain. China's "Qinglang,"(清朗) or Clean Web, campaigns have been targeting online rumors and self-media abuse since the early 2020s, but folding influence operations into the organized crime framework marks a fundamental reclassification. What was once treated as an internet governance problem is now a criminal justice matter.
The practical reach of that reclassification has already drawn attention at the local level. In Hubei's Jingzhou, authorities conducting their own sweeps have expanded targets to include underground churches and individuals flagged as dissidents — a pattern that echoes the 2018 campaign's controversy, when some local governments, under pressure to meet anti-crime quotas, inflated case severity and widened their targets well beyond what evidence supported.
Beijing's Crackdown Collides With Pre-Congress Political Arithmetic
The timing of the campaign is not incidental. China is heading into the year of its 21st National Congress, the leadership reshuffle that will determine the country's top political lineup. In Chinese political culture, major anti-crime drives in the run-up to a party congress have historically coincided with — and sometimes served as cover for — the removal of political adversaries. That suspicion circulates openly in Chinese civil society and among officialdom alike.
Scholars note that the current economic environment compounds these pressures. During periods of economic contraction, organized criminal networks tend to expand by colluding with local officials, cornering markets, or demanding protection payments — disrupting both public welfare and social order. China is also conducting township and grassroots elections across various regions this year, and authorities have signaled particular concern about criminal interference in those votes, which they describe as directly tied to the stability of the party's governing base.
Whether "organized crime" will be selectively invoked against political inconveniences — or whether the new digital crime category will be used to silence online critics under the banner of anti-gangsterism — remains the central question that observers in Beijing and beyond are watching closely. （Related： Taiwan Seeks Court Order to Dissolve China Unification Party ｜ Latest ）
