Abstract: Right after Xi Jinping took office as China’s new leader in 2012, he kicked off the largest and most comprehensive anticorruption campaign in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Thousands of corrupt officials have been punished including a few members of the powerful politburo. Scholars around the world have made many valuable arguments on Xi’s anticorruption campaign. But almost all of them have centered their studies on Xi’s anticorruption campaign or contemporary China. This paper will place Xi’s campaign in a historical backdrop and draw a comparison between Xi’s campaign and similar anticorruption campaign under three notable rulers in the Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties. This paper argues that, while Xi’s anticorruption campaign is comparable in many aspects to precedence in the dynasties, they have significant differences. The success and failure of dynastic anticorruption campaigns may provide readers with a better perspective in both understanding the nature and anticipating the likely outcome of Xi’s ongoing anticorruption campaign.