Perceived cadre corruption and government responsibility in China: does the blame stay local, and why (not)?

ABSTRACT

Using data from a 2008 nationwide survey in China, this study explores the relationship of perceived local-level corruption to government trust in an established authoritarian regime. With nearly two thirds of respondents considering cadre corruption to be a ‘serious problem,’ the authors find that perceptions of serious corruption are significantly and negatively related to trust in officials at all levels of government, including the central level. Contrary to extant findings that the Center is shielded from blame for well-intended policies that fail, the findings of this study suggest that when it comes to assigning blame for continued corruption, Chinese citizens – and especially urban Chinese – do not let Central officials off scot-free. Pushing further in an attempt to understand why some urban Chinese citizens seemingly hold the central government partly responsible for cadre corruption while others do not, analyses cast the spotlight on the level of education. As anticipated, education level is by itself negatively related to trust in the central government, but there is also unexpected evidence that among urbanites who perceive corruption to be a serious problem, it is actually the most highly educated who are most trusting.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Hans Jørgen Gåsemyr, John Wagner Givens, John Kennedy, Xinsheng Liu, Yuehong Tai, Dong ‘Erico’ Yu, Yu Zeng and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Information on data will be provided by Robert Harmel; and information on analytical procedures will be provided by Yao-Yuan Yeh.

Notes on contributors

Robert Harmel is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University.

Yao-Yuan Yeh is Chair of the Department of International Studies and Modern Languages, Director of the Master of Diplomacy and Strategic Affairs Program, and Associate Professor of International Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

Notes

1 It is particularly important for us to note here, given our focus on an Asian authoritarian regime, that Chang and Chu (2006, p. 259) studied the relationship of corruption to trust in Asian democracies and reported finding ‘a strong trust-eroding effect of political corruption’ in those democratic systems.

2 We should note that not all studies have reached this same conclusion. For example, Shechtel (2010) has concluded that corruption did not significantly impact satisfaction with democracy in African countries.

3 www.epochtimes.com/b5/nf226.htm.

4 www.bbc.co.uk/news/10595981.

5 https://www.chinausfocus.com/political-social-development/debunking-misconceptions-about-xi-jinpings-anti-corruption-campaign/; https://chinapower.csis.org/can-xi-jinpings-anti-corruption-campaign-succeed/; both accessed 7-31-19

6 For a review of corruption in China, roughly contemporaneous with the period of our data, see He, 2000.

7 It should be noted that further-reaching implications of local-level corruption would not be unique to China or to authoritarian regimes more generally. In her study of the transitional democracy of Argentina, Weitz-Shapiro (2008) found that ‘certain measures of local government performance, such as corruption, have ramifications for citizens’ evaluations of the functioning of their democracy and even for citizens’ faith in democracy per se’ (p. 285; see also p. 290). And in their study of Bolivia, Hiskey and Seligson (2003) found that local government performance (quality of services provided) affects systemwide support.

8 While an important aspect of Chinese governmental trust, this concept is not limited to China. As Su et al. (2016, p. 773) note, ‘in Asian countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, the public also demonstrate a pattern of finding the central government more trustworthy than local governments,’ while adding ‘the reverse pattern can be found in the United States, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.’ They attribute the difference to the perceived degree of performance of the different levels of government, with ‘central governments outperforming local ones’ in the authoritarian regimes and the opposite being true in democracies.

9 It should be noted for clarity that while students of Chinese politics – e.g. Su et al. (2016), Wu et al. (2016), and Lv and Xiao (2015) – generally use the term in this way, others attribute different meaning to the same words. Roniger (1987, p. 310), for instance, studies hierarchical trust as the ‘hierarchical relations of personal dependence’ in his comparative study of Brazil, Mexico and Japan.

10 Zhong measures perceptions of corruption as responses to the statement ‘You usually can’t get things done by municipal government workers without gifts or personal connections’ (p. 37).

11 Though combining local- and central-level trust into a single dependent variable, and hence losing the ability to address differences in trust for the two levels, it is still noteworthy that Wang and You (2016) analyzed data from two nationwide Asiabarometers (2002 and 2011) and found perceptions of local corruption to be related to the combined trust measure in both years. Though they do not separate urban from rural residents in their analyses, the variable ‘urban’ is found to be significantly related to trust in the 2011 survey.

12 Li (2004) has noted similarly that "Empirical studies of political trust in western democracies suggest that demographic characteristics also have an independent effect … It has been observed, for instance, that the elderly are the least trusting of political authority … and that lower-income people have less trust in government … and that the better educated have more political trust than the less educated … "

13 For these purposes, nationalistic feelings are captured by ‘strong’ or ‘somewhat’ agreement with the statement ‘I would rather be a citizen of China than of any other country in the world.’ [item b12a]

14 Our ‘social networking with politicians’ variable is operationalized as often having had contact with employees of party/state organizations, deputies of the People’s Congress, or commissioners of the People’s Consultative Conference. [items b4s1, b4s3, b4s9].

15 Note that we are here studying ‘political’ or ‘government’ trust, i.e. trust as expressed toward government officials. A separate and distinct literature deals with the relationship of corruption to ‘social’ trust, i.e. trust toward others in the society more generally (e.g. Rothstein 2013; Richey 2010; Rothstein and Eek 2009; Rothstein and Uslaner 2005).

16 GPS/GIS Assistant Area Sampling, designed to correct bias caused by coverage errors in list-based samples, was developed by the Research Center of Contemporary China at Peking University with Professor Pierre Landry of Yale University. For more on GPS/GIS sampling, see Landry and Shen (2005).

17 www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/

18 The China Survey asked two items, one pertaining to ‘personal experience with cadre corruption’ and the other to ‘a family member or close friend who has experienced or witnessed cadre corruption.’ Of those who answered both items, 18.8% answered ‘yes’ to at least one of the two items.

19 22.0% of the entire sample did not respond to this question, item e9 in The China Survey.

20 When the sample is split between urban and rural subsamples, it is apparent that those living in urban areas are even more likely than their rural counterparts to see cadre corruption as a problem (77.3% vs. 64.0%). Perhaps this reflects less refined conceptualization of corruption among the less educated rural population; perhaps it reflects more acceptance of lesser forms of corruption in the rural areas; or perhaps it simply reflects a lower level of corruption in rural settings. Regardless of the reason, it is urban residents more so than rural citizens who perceive corruption to be a significant problem in China, but with large majorities of both urban and rural residents agreeing that it is indeed a problem.

21 When asked about corruption more generally, without specifying level of government, 67.5% of those responding said that corruption is a serious problem and only 11.5% say it is not a problem. The relationship between responses to the two items (i.e. cadre vs. general corruption) is both significant and substantial, with r = 0.461 (p<.001, with n = 2811).

22 All regression results reported here are based on weighted estimates. Weighting reflects the probability of each case to be selected into the sample. Imputation for missing data is done using multiple imputation with chain equations. We also estimated our models with the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, with robust standard errors and with imputation. The results from these alternative estimations are statistically identical to the estimation of the weighted least squares method, whose results are reported in Table 3.

23 For these analyses, all independent/control variables except age and education have been converted to the range of 0–1 to ease interpretation of coefficients.

24 In an unpublished paper by Li (2012), based on the nationwide sample of The China Survey of 2008, he explicitly controlled for attitudes toward the level of corruption and found that perceptions of substantial corruption did not significantly contribute to level of trust in the central government. This in spite of the fact that Li was using the same data and the same dependent variable that we are using for this study! The explanation for the different findings can be found in Li’s use of satisfaction with the work of the central government and satisfaction with government policies – both of which are conceptually similar to and highly intercorrelated with central government trust – as control variables.

25 E.g., see Shi (1997).

26 And to some extent, since age and years of education are strongly correlated (r = −0.50 for the urban sample), education may account for some contribution of age as well.

27 An alternative explanation could be found in what Habibov et al. (2019) present as a ‘grease the wheels’ scenario. That is, those who perceive corruption to be a serious problem, but one which actually benefits them personally, could be crediting the central government for that favorable situation. And it is reasonable to expect that those with higher levels of education (and presumably higher incomes) would be better equipped to take advantage of special opportunities provided by corruption. Though we personally do not find this explanation as credible as the one offered above, it would certainly be worthy of empirical testing if/when appropriate data become available.

28 But this alone could not explain why the more highly educated among rural residents are not predisposed to rewarding the central government for its good intentions. The explanation for this discrepancy between highly educated rural and urban citizens could possibly be found in their different levels of exposure to information/propaganda concerning the central government’s efforts to control corruption. Indeed, there is evidence – based in data from The China Survey of 2008 – that those who are more highly educated and urban might also be more informed about the central government’s anti-corruption campaign to combat local corruption, and hence ‘more trusting’ of the center. When separating the highly educated (i.e., those with 12 years or more of formal education) into urban and rural subsets, we find that 44.5% of those urbans get political information from central television, while the comparable percentage for rurals is 36.4%. Similarly, we find that 17.6% of those urbans get political information from national newspapers, while the comparable percentage for rurals is 10.7%. Since the central news sources are the ones most likely to publicize the central government’s anti-corruption efforts, the fact that the highly educated urban citizens are more likely than rural counterparts (though not statistically significantly so due to small n’s) to steadily get political information from central news sources is consistent with our tentative explanation.