CHINA-INTERNAL: ANTI-CORRUPTION CAMPAIGN
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In a study of the anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping four years ago, Ni Xing and Li Zhen at the Institute of Governance and Public Affairs of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University, state that “If local government is overflowing with corruption, people will gradually shift responsibility for that to the centre as they perceive the centre’s failure of management to have led to such a state of affairs.” They attribute this to the centralisation of power. The study, which surveyed 83,300 people nationwide by telephone, was published in the latest edition of China’s Journal of Public Administration in September. The findings suggest that the campaign’s scope and length may inflict lasting damage on the party leadership’s image. They additionally suggest that Xi Jinping’s high profile anti-corruption campaign has fallen short of its stated goal and appears to be doing more harm than good to the image of China’s Communist Party. An analysis of official statistics done by the Financial Times shows that, for the vast majority of China’s Communist Party cadres in the civil service, the chances of being seriously punished for corruption remain slim. In the first three years of the campaign, fewer than 36,000 party members were handed over to China’s courts for prosecution — less than 0.5 per cent of the 7.5 million working as officials in 2015. Though almost 750,000 cadres were disciplined by the party over the same period, experts on party disciplinary mechanisms stress that most such cases amount only to a warning or demerit. Public attention has also been stoked by state media dispatches highlighting monthly statistics on officials who have been disciplined. Four out of five Chinese citizens consider official corruption a big problem according to a Pew Research Centre poll this spring, making it of greater concern than pollution and food safety. But nearly two-thirds of respondents in the Pew survey said they thought the corruption problem would improve over the next five years.
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