China's Striking Anti-Corruption Adventure: A Political Journey Towards the Rule of Law?

Abstract

China is a high-corruption country and the ruling Communist Party (“the Party”) has made anti-corruption enforcement a top priority. China is also well known for her authoritarian decisiveness in policy making and her effectiveness in policy implementation with a centralized political control contrasting sharply with a decentralized economic policy. This chapter examines two key aspects of this formulation. First, how has the authoritarian characteristic affected China’s anticorruption enforcement; and, second, how is China different from other countries, authoritarian or otherwise, in this regard?

This chapter discusses China’s anti-corruption enforcement within the context of the convergence/divergence debate and examines the degree to which the Chinese anti-corruption model converges or diverges from the prevailing “international best practice” that is commonly observed in the high income/low corruption countries. Specifically this chapter will also discuss whether China could develop an anti-corruption system that operates within a rule-based legal framework. The principal argument is that China’s anti-corruption practice manifests certain core features that may be unique to the Chinese political context and those features show most strikingly at the height of an anti-corruption campaign. But if we look beyond an exceptional “strike-hard campaign” that targets the “tigers”, shift the focus to the more routine enforcement against “flies”, and, in particular, observe China’s anti-corruption enforcement for a longer time span, it becomes clearer that China does not operate an anticorruption model sui generis. As the anti-corruption storm dies down (as it will naturally occur), the enforcement will become more routine, regularized, and institutional. When that happens, the Chinese anti-corruption model, if any, will appear no different from models elsewhere.