تمرکز زدایی و فساد پنهان تحت "حکومت مقرر" چین

This paper shows why corruption is especially difficult to detect under China’s system of decentralized authoritarian rule, which I call a “rule of mandates.” Local officials must pursue high priority political targets but have immense discretion over which laws to implement. A relative standard for corruption consequently arises since non-implementation of laws may be mandate-serving or may be corrupt; and determining which requires extra information on why non-implementation occurred. The theory is supported by evidence from original survey and case research on the implementation of the village elections law. I discuss implications for anticorruption efforts, development patterns, and future research.

Corruption in China is widely seen as an intractable problem despite the fact that the ruling Communist Party has publicly prioritized fighting corruption and issued ambitious reforms to do so. While studies of corruption in China have illuminated much about the patterns, causes, and consequences of corruption, there remains the puzzle of why the regime has so much difficulty fighting corruption despite the use of its powerful oversight and disciplinary systems. Prominent existing explanations for the regime’s failure focus on lack of central commitment, resistance from local officials, and too-limited strategies. Beyond these factors, in this paper I propose an underappreciated institutional explanation: that China has a governing system in which it is inherently difficult to even identify corruption. This explanation may seem counterintuitive, given the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party for invasive monitoring, but here I show why it may be an important missing part of the equation. My reasoning is not premised on the notion that the party’s information on its officials is especially poor, but rather on the idea that the information the party requires to identify what it would count as “corruption” is unusually great and hard to obtain. This additional information burden arises, I argue, as a consequence of China’s particular governing system, which I call a “rule of mandates” system, as opposed to a more familiar rule of law system.

In the paper, I have argued that China’s rule of mandates paradigm makes it particularly difficult to identify corrupt official behavior with certainty in China. The problem is not that the party has less information on its officials than it would under a rule of law paradigm, but rather that more information must be processed to identify corrupt behavior. Since a rule of mandates encourages officials to adjust the implementation of laws and policies in order to meet priority targets, variation in implementation is not an innate problem. In such a system, for all but the highest priority issues, officials must also know why variation occurred in order to determine how likely it is that corruption is present. A rule of mandates thus effectively veils corruption. What are the implications of this research for approaches to fighting corruption? Here I discuss, first, that it underscores how the relationship between decentralization and corruption depends on broader governing institutions. Second, I discuss the possibility that a rule of mandates might be used in developmental ways yet still destabilize over the long term. Here, I raise the question of whether it may be possible to strategically shift the locus of predatory corruption away from priority issue areas even as overall corruption is harder to control over the long term. Third, I discuss whether new models of anti-corruption reforms are needed for a rule of mandates.