Anti-Corruption Policy: China’s Tiger Hunt and India’s Demonetization

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the different styles of anti-corruption strategy, particularly at the local level in China and India. In China there has been a central push with a role of anti-corruption agencies that have law-enforcement power. In India there has been a focus on institutional building together with a visible role of the civil society. China has had a top-down approach while India has more of a bottom-up approach combined with top-down initiatives such as demonetization. Interviews with 44 mid-career and senior officials investigate the two approaches and the impacts of anti-corruption measures in China and India. Interviewees support the approaches adopted by China and India but doubt their effectiveness and sustainability. The way forward, they suggest, is to reduce the influence of political parties especially in India and to enhance e-governance in both countries. Experiences of the two countries have significant implications especially on capacity building, institutional development, and law enforcement.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-corruption
• new institutionalism
• institutional development
• e-governance
• China
• India

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Dr. Zeng Ming for his help in data collection and to Adam Graycar, Farhad Hossain, Ma Liang, Nie Huihua, Zhang Yahong, Zhong Yang, and Zhu Jiangnan for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The authors also benefited from helpful comments from the editor and the anonymous referees.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Transparency International. Anti-corruption: Changing China. 31 October 2014. https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/anti_corruption_changing_china.

2. See the full names of senior leaders investigated after the 18th Party Congress of the CCP. 11 July 2018. http://district.ce.cn/newarea/sddy/201410/03/t20141003_3638299.shtml.

3. The Modi government itself has changed the demonetization narrative from fighting corruption to moving towards a cashless or less cash society (Gopalan & Rajan, 2017).

4. See a detailed account of this movement and online activism, Ang (2014).

5. See a news report about the share of party members punished in China. 7 January 2011. http://www.china.com.cn/policy/txt/2011-01/07/content_21690357.htm.

6. Zhu (2015) notes that the low probability of corruption being detected and investigated, particularly among high-ranking public officials, casts doubt on the Chinese government’s anti-corruption efforts. However, the Xi administration has especially targeted many high-ranking public officials.

7. PM Modi’s address to the Nation. 8 November 2016. http://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-prime-minister-s-address-to-the-nation-533024.

8. Klitgaard (1997) points out the importance of institutions of civil society in anti-corruption in the developing context.

9. The implementation of the law has not been actualized. See Waiting for the Lokpal. 22 April 2017. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/waiting-for-the-lokpal/article18186362.ece.

10. Modi’s leveraging anti-corruption in the election campaign is similarly seen in the strategy of a grass-root movement-turned party, the Aam Aadmi Party (literally “common man’s party”), which made it the incumbent ruling party in Delhi in 2013.

11. Slightly adapted by the authors.

12. It is said that the National Supervision Law will strengthen the power of the CCDI while human rights observers worry that detention without informing lawyers and family members of suspects will harm human rights. See China: Revise draft national supervision law. New anti-graft body threatens abusive detentions. 10 November 2017. https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/10/china-revise-draft-national-supervision-law.

13. Although central leaderships play an important role in fighting corruption nationwide, local leaders and ordinary public officials in China and India are of crucial importance in making the anti-corruption policy effective at the local level (similar to other policy areas noted by Gilley (2017)). Furthermore, the study of corruption, as Wang (2016) suggests, should pay close attention to local contexts. Intriguingly, as it will be elaborated later, some local contexts related to anti-corruption told by our interviewees provide a nuanced understanding of anti-corruption in both countries.

14. See Note 1. The Transparency International suggests that “China should remove the threshold for bribes.”

15. As Lams (2018) notes, Xi’s campaign-style anticorruption is not new. He has, however, stepped up the movement compared with his predecessors.

16. In the Chinese context, there is a long-lasting debate of allowing public officials modest corruption acting as the lubricant of smoothly running machine. This argument sees that if public officials are constrained by rules and regulations and, particularly, if they are refrained from modest corruption, they cannot promote public services actively and ambitiously.

17. The Lokayukta is a state-level anti-corruption ombudsman organization while the Lokpal has jurisdiction over all Members of Parliament and employees in the central government.

18. In total, there are five layers of government in China: central, provincial, municipal, county, and township.

19. Guo (2014) notes that some anti-corruption experts in China argue for the introduction of institutionalized anti-corruption measures (zhidu fanfu).

20. The National Supervision Law passed by National People’s Congress in March 2018 is supposed to reinforce this trend.

21. On the effectiveness of campaign-style law enforcement in different contexts such as environmental law enforcement, please see Liu et al. (2015).

22. Zhang and Kim (2018) note that the general public will increase their trust in government with a time lag. Therefore, corruption convictions and Tiger Hunt in China may boost citizens’ trust in government in the future.

23. He (2000) remarked that “the current anti-corruption campaign is quite inadequate in combating corruption” (p. 269).

24. As the Chinese Constitution has removed the presidential term limits latterly, leadership stability seems to be positively related to corruption control (see an empirical study on the relationship between leadership stability and corruption control at the local level in China (Zhu & Zhang, 2017)).

25. Sangong refers to job-related entertainments in the Chinese public sector, see Gong and Xiao (2017) and Fu (2015).

26. Wang Qishan, a big driver of this anti-corruption campaign since 2012, stepped down after the 19th National Party Congress in China. Many doubt the sustainability of this anti-corruption effort.

27. Narendra Modi continues to ride the wave of popularity as India’s PM. 16 November 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/c3eff47c-c9eb-11e7-ab18-7a9fb7d6163e.

28. It should be noted that Chinese civil servants also value rule of law in public administration, like the Western counterparts (Yang & Van der Wal, 2014).

29. See Note 1. The Transparency International argues that “space for civil society to operate is essential for the public to be able to hold corrupt officials to account and to have a genuine independent voice against graft.”

30. The limitation of this small-n, perception-based study of corruption is acknowledged. As noted by Araral et al. (2019), corruption research should accord attention to different data such as individual-level, large-n data versus country-level, small-n data.

31. A big vaccine scandal in July 2017 reveals the consequence of corruption and the loss of governance capacity such as safety regulations in China. A decade ago, Mr. Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of State Food and Drug Administration in the PRC was executed due to corruption in drug administration. see China’s vaccination system has been tainted by corruption, weak regulations and staff shortages. 24 July 2018. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2156525/three-cancers-attacking-health-chinas-vaccine-system.