Policy Coordination and Selective Corruption Control in China

While authoritarian regimes lack institutions such as free elections, media supervision, and the rule of law to guarantee effective corruption control, these regimes do fight corruption. Nonetheless, facing widespread corruption, anticorruption agencies in authoritarian regimes are often constrained by scant resources, particularly attention. Attention is the prime scarce resource in governing; it guides the flow of other resources, such as budgets and manpower. Therefore, the allocation of anticorruption attention becomes especially important in influencing both the allocation of corresponding resources and the level of corruption control in authoritarian countries. The literature indicates to some extent when authoritarian leaders may pay more attention to certain cases or corrupt officials due to political calculations. However, little is known about whether and how anticorruption agencies allocate their attention across policy areas in autocracies. This question warrants investigation, especially as anticorruption programs targeting specific sectors treat the root causes of corruption more directly and thus are more effective than broad anticorruption policies.

We answered this question by scrutinizing the case of China, an authoritarian regime that has experienced rampant corruption in recent decades and has shown strong patterns of selective corruption control. Existing studies have explored the drivers of selective exemption or prosecution of corrupt officials in China and attributed them to a deficient anticorruption institution and power competition among political elites (Zhu & Li, 2020; Zhu & Zhang, 2017). An understudied facet of selective corruption control is that the Chinese procuratorate has constantly shifted its anticorruption attention across different policy sectors. The Chinese procuratorate is the state judicial branch under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); it functioned as the main state agency responsible for the investigation, prevention, and prosecution of corruption for a long time before the National Supervision Committee was established in 2018. Its shifting attention is especially puzzling given the widespread corruption across Chinese industries (Zhan, 2017; Zhu & Wu, 2015) and the low likelihood that serious sectoral corruption will be resolved once and for all.

To explain this shifting anticorruption focus, we propose a theoretical framework of cross-organizational policy coordination under a single-party authoritarian regime. We argue that single-party regimes can use the centralized party discipline and personnel management system as leverage to direct bureaucratic attention toward the signals given by top policymakers. The policy objectives prioritized by authoritarian leaders not only prompt the directly responsible functional sectors to act but also motivate or pressure other bureaucracies, including anticorruption agencies, to coordinate their policies with the national agenda. Contextualizing this logic to Chinese procuratorial departments, we collect qualitative evidence by conducting expert interviews with Chinese procuratorial officials on how the procuratorate has been mobilized to align their anticorruption work with central policy agendas to facilitate the CCP’s major policy initiatives by preventing corruption and investigating more cases in those areas.

Moreover, we quantify archival information by conducting a meticulous content analysis of Chinese governmental and procuratorial work reports from 1998 to 2016 and using multi-criteria decision-making techniques. Figure 1 presents the distribution of anticorruption attention across the 22 policy areas from 1998 to 2016 based on our content analyses of the supreme and provincial procuratorial works reports. A darker colour indicates more attention to an area. Issue areas that the Chinese government constantly emphasized in the reform era, such as construction and market order (eg the regulation of market activities and protection of property rights), receive continuous and great attention. By contrast, areas rarely prioritized by the Chinese government, such as culture, consistently receive little anticorruption attention. Areas between these two extremes receive fluctuating anticorruption attention. The heatmap also showcases several waves of tightened corruption control in selected policy areas (eg more attention to State-Owned Enterprises in 1999, foreign trade & investment in 2001, resources & environment in 2008 and 2009, and people’s livelihood, which covers poverty alleviation, in 2016).

Figure 1. Anticorruption Attention by Area (1998-2016)

Source: Authors’ coding of the 1998-2016 SPP and PPP annual work reports.

Note: Policy areas are listed in descending order by the overall degree of anticorruption attention of each area (ie sum of anticorruption attention across years).

To further examine the correlation of anticorruption attention with policy agendas, we scrutinize the annual government work reports (GWRs) of the State Council, the central government that heads all state bureaucracies in China, to extract policy topics and gauge their significance in the policy agenda. Following the widely applied coding procedure used in the Comparative Agendas Project and accommodating specificities of the Chinese political context, we code the work plan sections of the GWRs from 1998 to 2016 and identify 27 discrete policy topics. We focus on the 22 areas identified in both the GWRs and procuratorial work reports. To rigorously measure the significance of the 22 policy areas in each year, we use multiple criteria to minimize preconceived ideas about the importance of policy themes and employ the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods.

As shown in Figure 2, except in a few areas chronically ignored by the procurators between 1998 and 2016 (eg culture), anticorruption attention and policy significance have similar fluctuating patterns in most areas, with near-matching trend lines in areas such as land & real estate, state-owned enterprise, people’s livelihood, and work safety. Greater policy significance is usually accompanied by augmented anticorruption attention, whereas a steady decrease in policy significance often leads to reduced anticorruption attention. The coexistence of changes in policy agenda and shifting anticorruption attention strongly suggests that the Chinese procuratorate works in tandem with national policy-making.

Figure 2. Anticorruption Attention and Policy Significance by Area

Source: Authors’ calculation based on the procuratorial and government policy documents.

Note: For each policy area, the horizontal axis is year; the vertical axis on the left and the red line represent anticorruption attention, while the vertical axis on the right and the green line represent policy significance.

To address concerns that anticorruption attention may be influenced by other factors, most notably the severity of corruption in a policy area (controlled through individual effects), we conduct fixed-effects panel data regressions, using anticorruption attention as the dependent variable and policy significance as the key explanatory variable. The regression results show that policy significance is significantly positively associated with anticorruption attention. Based on the results of Model 1, when policy significance increases from the minimum to the maximum, anticorruption attention can increase by as much as 21 folds, all other things being equal. This finding holds even after controlling for political leadership, withstands robustness tests with alternative measures of policy significance and anticorruption attention and cross-validation using national fiscal expenditure and corruption investigation data, and is not confounded by the level of sectoral corruption as supported by the sensitivity test.

Thus, such cross-organizational coordination may assist the implementation of major national policies. However, a side effect is that anticorruption efforts can decline in policy areas that slide off the central government’s top agenda, even though corruption remains in those sectors. This side effect is corroborated by our field interviews and data on corruption investigation. Figure 3 also indicates that when the policy significance of an area drops (for instance, from the maximum to the median level, 0.27, in our dataset), the anticorruption attention received by this policy issue can shrink by as much as 83% (based on Model 1 in Table 1).

Table 1. The Effect of Policy Significance on Anticorruption Attention (1998-2016)

Note: The numbers in the parentheses are robust standard errors. Significance codes: ‘***’ p<0.001; ‘**’ p<0.01; ‘*’ p<0.05; ‘.’ p<0.1. Anticorruption attention= α*SPP mention + PPP mention; α =5 in Models 1-4; α =1 in Models 5 and 6, and α =10 in Models 7 and 8. Results with other values of α are available upon requests to the authors.

Figure 3. Estimated Effect of Policy Significance on Anticorruption Attention

Note: The estimation is based on Model 1 in Table 1. The grey area is the 95% confidence interval of the estimation.

This research is among the first to explore authoritarian anticorruption enforcement from the perspective of attention allocation to policy issues. Theoretically, our study advances the discussion on anticorruption endeavors in authoritarian regimes by showing that in addition to being motivated by political calculations such as elite power competition, single-party authoritarian regimes can strategically deploy anticorruption efforts as a policy tool to facilitate grand policy portfolios. Our findings resonated with research in predemocratic Brazil and Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam, in which the state could use political appointments to instrumentalize regulatory bureaucracies with expertise to serve government policies.

Methodologically, we devise novel and rigorous methods to extract systematic information from a rich but underutilized policy paper trail and reveal previously unnoticed details about an opaque regime. Our techniques and policy topic codebooks will be useful for future research on policy agendas in China and other regimes.

Future studies may conduct more comprehensive statistical tests when more data become available, and may explore more diverse empirical data and alternative measures of corruption investigation and policy significance to test whether the observed patterns in this research hold. Moreover, the impacts of intensified anticorruption measures on local bureaucrats who implement reform policies remain unclear. Future research could investigate the overall effect of policy-coordinating corruption control separately.

Jing Vivian Zhan is a Professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Jiangnan Zhu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.