[14] A number of people arrested (some even received death penalty) were children or relatives of government officials at various levels, including the grandson of Zhu De, demonstrating the principle of "equality before the law".
[6][7][8] The campaign itself was the subject of much controversy due to reported use of torture, extrajudicial detentions, arrest quotas, forced confessions and miscarriages of justice in which innocents were executed and or imprisoned for extended periods of time.
[15] The New York Times stated that the result of the campaign were largely ineffective due to the underfunding, training and financing of the police force.
In July 2021, South China Morning Post reported that Chen Yixin, secretary general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, stated that the new "strike hard" campaign against organized crime in 2018 would target the telecoms, resources, transport and construction sectors, industries in which rent seeking and corruption are commonly known to take place in China.
However, in March, Guo Shengkun, party secretary of the commission, said the campaign would continue as it had "won the people's support" for cleaning up the grass roots governance system (referring to residential communities in cities and villages in rural areas).