**Article Background**
This project contains supplementary material (Annexes) for the following book chapter:
Lang, Bertram (2022) "China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign under Xi Jinping: Framing Catastrophe and Catharsis in a Never-Ending Crisis", in Jörg Baberowski & Martin Wagner (Eds.) *Crises in authoritarian regimes*, Campus: Frankfurt / New York, ISBN: 9783593449685.
The author expresses his gratitude for helpful comments received on a draft version of this paper during a joint workshop by Humboldt University Berlin and Princeton University on "Crisis in Authoritarian Regimes, Past and Present" in January 2021.
**Abstract**
That Xi Jinping owed his rise to supreme power within the Chinese party-state not least to his ability to claim and authoritatively define an existential corruption crisis while simultaneously presenting himself as the one credible leader able to overcome and ‘solve’ this regime crisis is well established. By contrast, much less attention has been paid to the longer-term implications and resulting challenges of the crisis moment staged at the 18th Party Congress in 2012 for regime legitimation in the “new era” subsequently proclaimed by Xi. This chapter seeks to establish whether and how the corruption crisis, which fundamentally shaped the early years of Xi’s reign, was overcome and replaced with a new, post-crisis framing of the corruption problem.
Following a claim-based understanding of crises, I combine quantitative and qualitative content analysis techniques on a corpus of 6,957 articles published in major Chinese newspapers on (anti-)corruption and bribery between January 2007 and December 2020, complemented by 33 Xi speeches on anti-corruption assembled in the People’s Daily online “Series of Xi Jinping’s important speeches”. Inter alia, structural topic modeling (stm) and sentiment analysis techniques are used to demonstrate significant shifts in Chinese media discourses from a pre-crisis era (2007-2012) to a crisis era during Xi's early reign (2012-2014), and again to a post-crisis era in which controversies are increasingly shunned and the overall salience of the corruption topic diminishes sharply.
