Zhao Kezhi (1953–)
Minister of Public Security from 2017 to 2022 — China's top police official through the peak expansion of Xinjiang's detention system. His classified speech of June 15, 2018, leaked in the Xinjiang Police Files, is rare documentary evidence tying a minister to the system. He is, notably, on no U.S. or EU sanctions list.
1. From village schoolteacher to governor of four provinces
Zhao Kezhi was born in December 1953 in Laixi, Shandong. His first job, in March 1973, was teaching at a local middle school; he joined the Communist Party in January 1975. His subsequent career is a textbook provincial ladder: mayor of Laixi and of Jimo, party chief of Jimo and then of Dezhou prefecture in 1997, vice-governor of Shandong from 2001 to 2006, executive vice-governor of Jiangsu from 2006 to 2010, then governor of Guizhou in 2010 and its party secretary from July 2012. In July 2015, when Hebei party secretary Zhou Benshun fell in a corruption case, Zhao was sent in as the replacement; the planning of the Xiong'an New Area began on his watch there. He sat on the 18th and 19th Central Committees.
One feature of this record matters for everything that followed: Zhao had no background in the political-legal system at all. He had never served in a police force, a court or a procuratorate. His selection in 2017 was therefore not about detective work. It was about proven provincial command — a party secretary who had run four provinces and could be trusted to press the centre's will down to the level of the local police station. The Ministry of Public Security did not need a famous investigator. It needed an administrator whose loyalty and execution had already been tested.
2. Taking over the police, 2017
In October 2017, immediately after the 19th Party Congress, Zhao became party secretary of the Ministry of Public Security. On November 4, 2017 the National People's Congress Standing Committee appointed him Minister of Public Security. In March 2018 he added the rank of State Councilor; in June 2018 he became a deputy secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and he also chaired the national counter-terrorism leading group. Command of China's police, its coordinated armed-police liaison, its counter-terrorism apparatus and the day-to-day political-legal system was now concentrated in his hands.
The ministry he inherited stood at a marked turning point. The 709 Crackdown of 2015 had already dismantled the rights-lawyer community as an organised force. In Xinjiang, the mass expansion of the internment camps was beginning that same year, 2017. In Zhao's public speeches as minister, one phrase recurred as the organising principle: political security comes first, and the police are above all a political organ. That was not rhetoric. Nationwide operations executed by the system he led during his tenure included the follow-up enforcement against 709 lawyers and their support networks; the police side of the December 9, 2018 raid on Chengdu's Early Rain Covenant Church and the 2018 closure of Beijing's Zion Church, within a broader nationwide tightening on unregistered churches; and, after the Hong Kong National Security Law of 2020, the ministry's Hong Kong role, including the Central Government's Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong, established in July 2020. A note on levels, which this page observes strictly: the individual operations were executed by local public security organs, and nothing here claims Zhao personally ordered a specific local case. They occurred under his ministry, inside his chain of command, and in line with the enforcement line he publicly articulated. This archive records system responsibility; it does not fabricate personal orders.
3. June 15, 2018: the classified speech
The most direct evidence linking Zhao Kezhi to the Xinjiang detention system is a speech he never intended to publish. In June 2018 he spent five days inspecting Xinjiang. On June 15, 2018, after hearing reports from the region's public security and stability apparatus, he addressed its leadership. The transcript, marked as a classified document, later leaked as part of a large cache of internal Xinjiang police material and was published on May 24, 2022 by a consortium of fourteen international outlets led by the BBC — the Xinjiang Police Files. Adrian Zenz's systematic analysis of the files appeared in the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, and on March 23, 2023 he submitted written testimony to the U.S. Congress devoted in large part to this speech.
According to Zenz's analysis of the text — and this page attributes the reading to him throughout — Zhao stated that in southern Xinjiang alone, more than two million people had been severely influenced by the infiltration of extremist religious thought. The scope of that figure must be stated exactly: he was speaking of people classified as influenced, not of people detained. But the significance of the speech lies precisely there. A Minister of Public Security, speaking internally, defined the problem population of southern Xinjiang in the millions — the same order of magnitude as the detention system then being built. The speech praised the Strike Hard campaign and de-extremification work since 2014, and, on Zenz's reading of the text, relayed the central leadership's — specifically Xi Jinping's — instructions and support for expanding detention capacity, funding and staffing. A companion speech by Chen Quanguo days later, on June 18, 2018, likewise traced his authority to the top. Read together, the two texts complete a chain of command: direction set at the summit, execution organised by the Xinjiang party committee, and the Minister of Public Security travelling in person to inspect, endorse and promise resources. Zhao's position in that chain is not bystander. He is the courier and the guarantor — the nation's police chief telling Xinjiang's police system that the centre knows what it is doing and that the money will follow.
4. The ministry's structural role in Xinjiang
Zhao's responsibility is also structural. The camps ran on police infrastructure: detention lists generated with the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, the big-data system that fused personal records and flagged suspects; camp security and transfers; household registration and exit controls. The Police Files show that in Konasheher county alone, more than ten thousand people were recommended for detention or scrutiny through that platform. The construction and nationwide promotion of such systems, and the ministry's assessment, commendation and personnel rotation of Xinjiang's police, all ran through his ministry in his years.
He also chaired the national counter-terrorism leading group — the discourse hub that fixed the official label for the entire Xinjiang programme. "Counter-terrorism and de-extremification" is the formula with which Beijing answers every Xinjiang allegation, and the enforcement interpretation of that formula sat with the public security and counter-terrorism system. When the UN human rights office's assessment of August 31, 2022 concluded that Xinjiang's counter-terrorism and de-extremification laws had been applied in overly broad ways that structurally produced abuse, the senior enforcement official for the years of their widest application, 2017 to 2022, was Zhao Kezhi.
This page confines his responsibility to what is documented. He did not sign the leaked camp operations manual — that signature is Zhu Hailun's. No public record shows him ordering a detention quota for a named camp. What is documented is threefold: he was the country's top police official throughout the peak expansion of the detention system in 2017–2019; his June 2018 speech endorsed the system internally and relayed the resources for its growth; and his ministry supplied the lists, the security and the official vocabulary. Each element rests on public documents or on a leaked text verified by a fourteen-outlet consortium.
5. Two more campaigns: Hong Kong and COVID
Two further nationwide operations define his tenure. In Hong Kong, Zhao repeatedly and publicly backed the Hong Kong police's efforts to end the 2019 protests, meeting Hong Kong security officials in his capacity as State Councilor and minister. After the National Security Law was imposed on June 30, 2020, his ministry stood up the Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong (opened July 8, 2020), whose first director, Zheng Yanxiong, came out of the mainland security system. Mainland public security thereby acquired a permanent enforcement presence in Hong Kong on Zhao's watch. Meeting Hong Kong's Secretary for Justice in July 2021, he again stressed that safeguarding national security embodied the centre's overall jurisdiction over Hong Kong, as Xinhua reported. These were not courtesies: the ministry is the law's mainland executive hub, and the Hong Kong office's personnel and budget run through his system.
Then came COVID. Through the zero-COVID years of 2020 to 2022, China's police carried the backbone of lockdown enforcement: movement tracing for contact investigations, order at isolation sites, a stream of "epidemic rumour" cases, and detentions and criminal filings against people accused of breaking control rules. Zhao chaired repeated ministry meetings deploying epidemic control and stability work together. In scale and duration this dwarfed ordinary policing, and it connected the public security system to every citizen's daily life — the data behind the health code, the checkpoint at the compound gate, the late-night knock of the contact tracers were all one apparatus. Individual case responsibility lies at local level; this page records the system-level command responsibility, which was his.
His tenure also saw the ministry reorganised: in 2018 the National Immigration Administration was created under the ministry, consolidating border inspection and exit-entry control, while the various sectoral police forces were restructured. For border regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet it meant one more nationally unified layer of movement control. Zhao's own summary of his doctrine, repeated in ministry communiqués, was to build the police politically — a force "absolutely loyal, absolutely pure, absolutely reliable." Those twelve characters, from meetings he chaired, are the fairest key to his five and a half years: the political purification of the force came first, and the nationwide tightening of enforcement followed from it.
6. The purge inside the house: the Sun Lijun case
No account of Zhao's ministry is complete without the purge that ran through it. In April 2020, vice-minister Sun Lijun was arrested. In October 2021, Fu Zhenghua — another former vice-minister of public security, by then Minister of Justice — fell as well. The authorities later designated Sun and his associates a "political clique" accused of disloyalty and faction-building. As MPS party secretary, Zhao chaired the ministry's campaign to eliminate the Sun Lijun clique's poisonous influence, demanding thorough purges of the ranks at meeting after meeting.
The internal purge and the external enforcement line are two faces of one coin. Outwardly, the police policed society by the standard of political security. Inwardly, the police policed themselves by the standard of political loyalty. Sun Lijun had himself run the domestic security bureau — the very heart of political-security enforcement — and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan affairs. A political-security chief destroyed by a political case, with the cleansing chaired by the minister who had served alongside him: the episode lays bare the system's inner logic. When loyalty is the supreme standard, no executor is safe, not even the executors. Zhao himself crossed the purge untouched and retired on schedule — a contrast with Sun and Fu that is itself a document of how power works inside the political-legal system.
7. Departure
On June 24, 2022, Wang Xiaohong — a long-time associate of Xi Jinping — succeeded Zhao as Minister of Public Security, a handover widely read as completing the consolidation of the police under the leader's own people. Zhao kept the State Councilor rank until March 2023 and then retired. As of this page's verification in October 2026, no public source records a new office or a major public appearance for him since.
The timing deserves one factual note. The Xinjiang Police Files were published on May 24, 2022, and his classified speech was being quoted line by line in international media; one month later he handed over the ministry. No official statement has ever connected the handover to the files, and this page draws no such inference. It records the sequence, and leaves it there.
8. The sanctions check: a negative that must be written down
This archive checks sanctions for every person it profiles. For Zhao Kezhi the check comes back negative — and the negative is itself a finding. On July 9, 2020 the U.S. Treasury, under the Global Magnitsky Act, sanctioned four Xinjiang officials: Chen Quanguo, Zhu Hailun, Wang Mingshan and Huo Liujun. The serving Minister of Public Security is not on that list. The European Union's Xinjiang sanctions of March 22, 2021 — Zhu Hailun, Wang Junzheng, Wang Mingshan, Chen Mingguo and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau — do not name him either. Nor do the parallel British and Canadian lists of the same day. A June 2022 European Parliament resolution called for sanctions reaching higher-level officials, but the Council never adopted it.
As of October 2026, a check of the public sanctions lists finds no jurisdiction that has designated Zhao Kezhi personally. The gap between that record and his documented role is stark: a classified speech ties him directly to the expansion of the detention system, and the sanctions architecture stepped around him, stopping at regional officials. Explanations offered publicly include the diplomatic convention against designating a sitting cabinet-level minister, and timing — the Police Files surfaced in 2022, after the main designation rounds of 2020–2021. This page records the gap without adopting any party's motive for it. The gap itself is a specimen of the limits of sanctions as an accountability tool.
9. Responsibility
Zhao Kezhi belongs in this archive for one sentence of a reason: he is among the very few central, ministerial-level officials whom an internal document names in person. Between most central leaders and the Xinjiang system there is only an organisational chart. Between Zhao and the system there is a text — classified, leaked, and verified by a media consortium — in which he personally sizes the problem population (two million and more "influenced"), personally blesses Strike Hard, and personally relays the centre's promise of capacity and money. In the responsibility politics of the CCP, such a text is a fossil of accountability.
His second responsibility is systemic. Between 2017 and 2022 China's police completed a turn that made political security their overriding function: the 709 follow-through, the church enforcement, the Hong Kong security office, the COVID mobilisation. The turn was steered by the ministry's party committee and its minister's office, and he was the minister for five and a half years. This page therefore states his responsibility in two layers. On Xinjiang, he was the endorser and the resource courier, and the evidence is the Police Files. On nationwide enforcement, he was the chief executive of the political-security line, and the evidence is his own public record. Neither layer rests on speculation.
10. Disputes and positions
On authenticity: China's official response to the Xinjiang Police Files is blanket rejection — the files are dismissed as fabrications by anti-China forces. Beijing has never itemised a rebuttal of the speech's contents, nor published a version of its own. The texts are archived by academic institutions including the University of Vienna; Zenz's analysis passed peer review, and the consortium spent months on verification. This archive classifies the speech as a verified leaked document, while recording the official non-recognition.
On the two-million figure: some early Western coverage misread the sentence as a detention count. The text's own scope is people "severely influenced by extremist religious thought" — the population base Beijing defined as needing de-extremification. This page insists on the original scope because the original is damning enough. When a country's police chief defines two million residents of one region as a population under extremist influence, the scale logic of the "education" and detention that followed is already written. The number needs no exaggeration. The document speaks for itself.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia, "Zhao Kezhi" (career, tenure as Minister of Public Security, succession): en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Xinjiang Police Files" (contents of the leak, the June 2018 speeches by Zhao Kezhi and Chen Quanguo, detention protocols): en.wikipedia.org
- Adrian Zenz, written testimony to the U.S. Congress, March 23, 2023 (analysis of Zhao Kezhi's June 15, 2018 speech and detention-scale estimates): docs.house.gov
- Caixin Global: Wang Xiaohong appointed Minister of Public Security, June 28, 2022 (with Zhao's tenure background): caixinglobal.com
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