The Inquisition

The Inquisition is a work of long-form anti-corruption reportage by the writer Ding Jie, published in April 2017 by the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Press, with a preface by Er Yuehe. The author himself once served as secretary of the discipline inspection commission of a provincial-level cultural institution. Assigned by the disciplinary inspection department, he reviewed more than six hundred case files of corruption and selected representative samples from them, then spent two years holding face-to-face, in-depth conversations with officials who had fallen from grace, ultimately producing this work of nonfiction grounded in real material. The book consists of a motto, three sets of background materials (data, voices, duties), a preface, eight main sections, and an impressions chapter and an epilogue. The eight sections combine first-person oral accounts with interviewer's notes, each focusing on a different type and level of disciplinary and legal violation: officials who lost their footing to emotion and desire; people who became conduits for power-for-money deals under the guise of refined pursuits; a university party secretary who was incorruptible on one side and greedily corrupt on the other; a county party secretary who fell into the law's net while repaying her husband's years of devotion; and a state-owned enterprise head who moved from industry to political maneuvering. To protect the privacy of interviewees, the author concealed real names and broke apart and recombined details from different cases, so every figure in the book is both real and not a complete mirror of any single actual person. Unlike many anti-corruption books that stop at conclusions, this book presses on the question of "why": why did these elites, once exceptionally capable, slide into degeneration after taking power? How do power, money, erotic desire, and personal ties erode a person's bottom line step by step? After each chapter the author appends interviewer's notes, using a question-and-answer format to restore the arrogance, abjection, confusion, and struggle within the subjects, letting readers see that corruption is not a sudden accident but a trajectory of gradual loosening and gradual breach of discipline and law. The language is calm and restrained, combining literary power with a cautionary tone, and the book is often used as supplementary reading for party conduct and clean government education.