HONG KONG — China issued a directive on Tuesday banning the construction of government buildings for the next five years, the latest in a series of initiatives by President Xi Jinping to discourage corruption and foster frugality at a time of broad popular resentment against high-living bureaucrats.

The central government authorities in Beijing have periodically tried to rein in the widely mocked penchant for grandiosity among local officials who order offices for themselves. A few of these projects have been slowed or stopped, including the nearly Pentagon-size headquarters started by a local government several years ago in an impoverished corner of Anhui Province in central China.

But until now, such isolated cases have done little to dissuade other local officials from their own pharaonic ambitions. The government of Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, attracted critical attention across China last fall after beginning construction of what was initially planned as Asia’s largest government building.

But Tuesday’s joint directive by China’s cabinet and the Chinese Communist Party went much further than prohibiting the construction of buildings: it also banned a long list of strategies that local leaders have used to circumvent previous, more informal efforts to discourage them.