This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Xi Jinping’s bid to root out corruption from the 88m-member Communist party is to get the Netflix treatment after Beijing commissioned a £12.7m television drama celebrating the Chinese president’s campaign.

In the Name of the People - a 42-part series being bankrolled by China’s top law enforcement agency - is scheduled for broadcast later this year and will reportedly be the first series in which one of the party’s most senior leaders is portrayed as a villain.

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The state-sanctioned drama follows the adventures of Hou Liangping, a dashing government investigator played by television heartthrob Lu Yi, as he travels to a fictitious Chinese province called Bianxi to investigate a murder.

Hou is joined by his wife, an undercover agent who has been ordered to surreptitiously probe the affairs of Bianxi’s answer to Frank Underwood on behalf of China’s feared anti-corruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

In order to understand the lives of those snared by Xi’s crusade against corruption, the producers of the 120m yuan series have reportedly been given rare access to a high security prison in eastern China. Filming will conclude in June with the series set to air later this year.

The drama’s producers at the party-controlled Supreme People’s Procuratorate declined to discuss the project with a foreign news organisation on Tuesday, citing its “very sensitive” nature.

But in an interview with the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, director Fan Ziwen said officials had approved their series because they believed it would highlight efforts to eradicate corruption rather than simply showing how rotten the system had become.

Beijing hoped to show “our party’s steadfast solve to fight corruption,” Fan said.

Fighting official corruption and malfeasance has been one of the central planks of Xi Jinping’s administration since he took power in 2012.

“If we allow these problems to spread like weeds, the consequences will be disastrous,” Xi warned top party leaders after taking office.

“As the saying goes, ‘Stay in a fish market long enough, and one will get used to the stink.’”

Under Xi, hundreds of thousands of officials have been disciplined, including some of the party’s most ruthless and influential figures such as former security chief Zhou Yongkang who was jailed for life last year.

Xi has described his anti-corruption campaign as key to guaranteeing the party’s survival but critics say it has also been used to purge the president’s political rivals.

In the Name of the People - or Renmin de mingyi in Chinese - is the latest front in a propaganda war designed to convince China’s 1.4bn citizens that the battle against corruption is being won.

Su Wei, a professor at a Communist party school in southwest China, told the Global Times newspaper the drama underlined Beijing’s “resolution to propel the advance of anti-corruption efforts by depicting corruption involving top-level national officials”.

China has been producing propaganda-heavy anti-corruption dramas for more than two decades.

The first - a hit series called Heaven Above - was screened in 1995 in an attempt to bolster an anti-corruption campaign being led by then president Jiang Zemin, Bai Ruoyun writes in her book on the genre, Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics.

But until now such dramas have avoided implicating the country’s top leaders in the sordid world of chicanery and crime that has devoured the Communist party in recent decades.

“Depicting a corrupt provincial governor or party secretary was deemed unacceptable, first because there were only about 30 provincial leaders in the whole country and criticism could be seen as specifically targeted, and second because many provincial leaders were members of the party’s central committee, which was and still is immune from media criticism unless authorised by the party leadership,” Bai wrote in her 2015 book.

In the Name of the People will reportedly up the ante by casting someone close to the very pinnacle of power as its bad guy.

The Beijing Youth Daily said the drama would feature a mysterious “big boss” figure, a man so powerful that other characters dared not even utter his name.

Predictably, it will also have a happy ending.

According to the newspaper, the drama concludes with three thieving Bianxi officials going on trial for corruption, as so many others have now done under president Xi.

Additional reporting by Christy Yao