Advertisement Chen Yixin has rapidly gone from strength to strength and is now emerging as the leading candidate for secretary of the Central Politics and Legal Affairs Commission in 2022, with even speculation of a path to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary in 2027. However, Chen’s path to Politburo promotion is complicated by paranoia over the ever-present threat of a palace coup. Chen is heading up the 2021-2022 rectification campaign, a political purge along the lines of the first Xi administration’s “flies and tigers” campaign, which cleared political opposition for the second Xi term and allowed for greater institutional centralization of a variety of powers: legislative, internal security, party, military, and paramilitary. Chen, then, in 2021 is perhaps the most feared political entity in China domestic politics. The rhetoric surrounding this new rectification campaign has been stark: slogans like “remove the tumors” and “like Yan’an” echo the earliest of Mao Zedong’s Stalin-inspired political purges to ensure CCP loyalty, with the contemporary policy additions of “drive the blade in” and “scrape the bone clean.”