Abstract: The anti-corruption drive launched by General Secretary Xi Jinping in late 2012, early 2013 has been criticized as a political purge designed to weed out Xi’s would-be rivals within the communist party leadership rather than a genuine attack of corruption. In this article, I use the historical precedent of the purges launched in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin to define what constitutes a purge and what distinguishes a purge from a political witch hunt. I then examine Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, arguing that while a small part of the campaign may be a politically motivated attack on his rivals, the primary focus of the drive has been against the much larger problem of corruption within the party, state, and business sector.