Chinese leader Xi Jinping recently led all high-ranking officials in Beijing to retake the loyalty oath and pledge their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The move comes amid rumors circulating on overseas Chinese media and some U.S. outlets about top Chinese security official Dong Jingwei who allegedly defected earlier this year and fled to the United States with his daughter.
All 25 members of the Politburo—the top decision-making body of the CCP—and other top officials such as chairs of the secretariat, state councilors, the president of the supreme court, the chief prosecutor, and senior members of the rubber-stamp legislature (the National People’s Congress) and the Central Military Commission, retook the Communist Party oath at the History’s Exhibition Hall in Beijing on June 18.
The pledge included the statement: “Be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the Party … never betray the Party.”
Before taking the oath, Xi asked all CCP leaders to “maintain a high degree of consistency with” the Party, in terms of ideology, politics, and action.
On June 19, China’s top watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), asked all CCP members to fight against traitors and to never betray the Party.
Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator believed that these actions were a response to “some CCP senior officials who have betrayed the Party recently.”
Beijing recently released information that Dong, a vice minister of state security at the center of the rumors, was still in China. The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), the regime’s top spy agency, published on its official website that Dong hosted a counterintelligence seminar in the ministry on the morning of June 18. But the announcement didn’t mention whether the seminar was held in person or online, or who participated in it.