It was announced in April and formally launched in June with a speech by Mr Xi to the Politburo calling for a "thorough clean-up" of the party to rid it of "formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance".
He dismantled much of the state ownership and some of the bureaucratism inherited from Franco.
Although some of the most-articulate intellectuals in the People's Republic of China criticize their Confucian heritage as the embodiment of authoritarianism, bureaucratism, nepotism, conservatism, and male chauvinism, others in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and North America have imaginatively established the relevance of Confucian humanism to China's modernization.
"We must resolutely reject formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance, and resolutely fight against corruption and other misconduct in all manifestations," Mr Xi told 3,000 legislators in a speech to close the country's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress.
The campaign is set to last a year and is intended in part to purge the party of formalism, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance.
"Inside the party there are problems that need to be addressed, especially the problems of corruption, taking bribes, being out of touch with the people, undue emphasis on formalities and bureaucratism, which must be addressed by great efforts," he pledged.
These are the two extremes of a Janus-faced problem: spontaneous but unsustained radicalism on the one side, hypertrophied bureaucratism on the other.
