Anticorruption Volatility in China

• In Event: China’s Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the New Era

Abstract

Recent years have seen rising interest in studying China’s anticorruption efforts, and the focus is often on the changing intensity of corruption crackdowns over time. However, I argue that two other facets have also manifested constant variations: 1) the fuzzy and fluid connotation of corruption in different eras of the Chinese Communist regime; and 2) shifting anticorruption attention across policy domains. I define these two aspects, together with the changing anticorruption intensity, as “anticorruption volatility” in China. Explaining such volatility can greatly help us unpack the underlying political logic of anticorruption in China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
I explain the issue under the premise of goal multiplicity. I argue that the government often loads multiple political and policy goals onto its anticorruption endeavors, which thereby serve a mixture of purposes beyond simply combating corruption. When goals compete and conflict, anticorruption is prioritized differently in the CCP’s policy agenda depending on the authorities’ perceived importance of other political and policy goals, determining what, when, and how to fight corruption and who to target. Three sets of goals in particular, a) the grand political goal of the CCP regime to legitimize its leadership, b) the guiding policy goals of economic reform, and c) political elites’ individual goals, influence concept adaptation, anticorruption intensity, and anticorruption attention allocation in China over time.
Data are drawn over the lengthy time span from the CCP’s early years to China under President Xi using mixed methods by combining manual and machine reading of government documents, newspapers of the state media, leaders’ speeches, interviewing government insiders, and statistical analyses.

Author

• Jiangnan Zhu, The University of Hong Kong