It seems to me that it's an actual genuine effort, given that the publicity of the drive has damaged Chinese public confidence in their institutions of government (high profile corruption is often featured in the news) and because many of the people taken to court have been in Xi Jinpeng's own circle and have represented for him a loss of personal power in the party. I haven't read much about Xi's personal power growing all particularly much during the anti-corruption drive, and there is a legitimate question whether he will be revoted to lead the party during the congress next year (though it is expected to continue).
Definitely this angle on understanding the drive should not be ignored. An attempt to corroborate it - to unpick the knot - would require a great amount of study of the Chinese People's Party, of Xi Jinping's constituency, and both the consistency of and the timing of charges brought to bring in the high level fraud. Documents and communications from Jinping or his circle discussing "who to go after" would represent a smoking gun (of course we haven't even smelled anything like this).
I read an expose from Foreign Policy where they tried to build a case that Xi Jinping has been using it to consolidate power, but it was very clumsy and as its predictions and information came into question the investigative direction taken by the expose has been abandoned (as far as I can tell).
The way the anti-corruption drive has proceeded, as I understand, has been in tracking how government finances are being used and that the Chinese Government tends to find - using traditional accounting audits - rings of people who are enriching themselves using various schemes (though many times really obvious transfers into personal accounts). So far it has appeared that the anti-corruption effort has both been making an actual positive effect on government efficiency and that it has been primarily non-political and untargetted, focusing more on finding abuse of public funds than in chasing after any officials in particular.