Reform-Facilitating Corruption Control in China

Abstract

Anticorruption endeavors in autocracies show strong patterns of selective law enforcement, such as temporal changes of intensity and targeted officials for investigation. Using the case of China, we show that authoritarian anticorruption focus can also shift across policy domains over time. We propose a theoretical framework of policy coordination in single-party authoritarian regimes to explain such selectiveness. Through case studies, expert interviews, and statistical analysis of an original dataset based on meticulous content analysis of policy papers of the Chinese government and procuratorate from 1998 to 2016, we demonstrate that Chinese prosecutors gear anticorruption priorities toward policy areas accentuated in the central government’s major reforms. Our findings enrich the existing studies on authoritarian corruption control by showing that single-party regimes, through the leadership over the judiciary and mobilization of the cadre corps, can strategically deploy anticorruption endeavors as policy tools to facilitate the implementation of national policy agendas.