A TV documentary series on China's anti-corruption and discipline inspections has provided details about the campaign which were previously unknown to the public.
The first episode of the series "The Sword of Inspection" aired on state media China Central Television and the website of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on Thursday evening.
The episode received about 900,000 views within four hours of its release, according to the CCDI website.
It featured untold stories about the inspections as well as interviews with corrupt former senior officials.
According to the documentary, during the investigation of Wu Changshun, a former senior political advisor and police chief in north China's Tianjin Municipality, members of the inspection team had to be "extremely careful" to keep confidential information safe.
Ren Aijun, an inspector involved in the case, said they had to use special equipment to scan their meeting rooms and dorms, in case the veteran police official tried to intercept their communications.
Wu was not aware of the operation until his son-in-law was detained.
He immediately rushed home from a dinner party and started to destroy evidence.
"The documents and all the materials...were put into the shredder...A vehicle was packed with things [illegal gains], but it was still not enough to take it all away," Wu said in an interview featured in the documentary.
However, it was too late as the inspection team had already collected enough evidence, based on tip-offs from the public.
Wu was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for graft. A court trial found him guilty of crimes including bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power.
On June 21, the CPC discipline agency published the results of the 12th round of inspections, marking the completion of inspections by central authorities during the term of the 18th CPC Central Committee into CPC organizations in provincial-level regions, central CPC and government organs, major state-owned enterprises, central financial institutions and centrally-administered universities.
The 18th CPC Central Committee is the first in Party history to successfully inspect all these entities in one term.
Starting from the first round of inspections in May 2013, a total of 160 teams have been dispatched and 277 Party and governmental agencies, units and institutions have been inspected.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, more than 60 percent of the investigations into centrally-administered officials were a result of information found by discipline inspectors.
Inspection teams discovered the misconduct of Su Rong, a former vice chairman of a top political advisory body. During the second round of inspections, corruption problems in Shanxi were exposed, which resulted in seven provincial-level officials being investigated.
Election fraud was also revealed in in Liaoning, Hunan and Sichuan provinces.
"I was surprised [by the investigation], but it was also expected," Su Shulin, former governor of Fujian Province and a former general manager of Sinopec, one of China's leading oil companies, said in the documentary.
Su was expelled from the CPC and dismissed from public office for corruption and violating the Party's code of conduct.
The CCDI said Su abused his power and caused great losses for state-owned properties, acted against the Party's eight-point frugality code, sought profits for relatives and was suspected of bribery.
"At first I did things for private enterprise owners and accepted benefits from them...After I was promoted to higher positions, doing this myself became much more risky," Su said.
"I asked my younger brother to do things and greased the wheels for his business. I asked him to accept benefits on my behalf. I told him to do so. I did harm to him," Su said in the interview.
A meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in April said that the Party's inspection work has been greatly invigorated since the 18th CPC National Congress.
According to the meeting, inspections have been strengthened and developed, and intra-Party supervision has been integrated with supervision by the public, giving new vitality to the inspection system.
In July, the CPC issued a revised regulation on inspections, in a renewed effort to improve supervision and governance of its more than 89 million members.
