Is China still on an anti-corruption road to nowhere, despite Xi Jinping’s campaign?

In China, whistle-blowing remains risky and the media is not free to probe. If Beijing is serious about tackling corruption, it has to make more transparent its processes in decision making, policy setting and accountability, establish judicial and legislative independence, and empower citizens

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, can do more to keep his promise to put power in an institutional cage. Photo: Xinhua

Dan Hough

Dan Hough is a Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex.

Published: 6:00am, 25 Jan 2020Updated: 7:18am, 25 Jan 2020

Eight years into President Xi Jinping’s rule and mainland China appears to have made little progress in tackling corruption, at least according to Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, the latest of which was released on January 23.

Is the Communist Party getting its anti-corruption efforts wrong, or is the index is not really measuring corruption at all? It is both, but much more the former than the latter.

The Corruption Perceptions Index is a global measure of how much public-sector corruption exists in 180 places around the globe. Transparency International, arguably the world’s leading anti-corruption NGO, pulls together a range of data to give each territory a composite score out of 100. The higher the score, the better the anti-corruption effort.

Last year, the star performers were New Zealand and Denmark, with 87 points each. The worst performer was Somalia with 9 points, just behind South Sudan (12) and Syria (13).