Anti-corruption is undoubtedly one of Xi Jinping’s most significant political legacies since he came to power in 2012. It began with the purge of Li Chuncheng, which led to the downfall of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang.
Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has touched all aspects of Chinese politics, from central and local governments to state-owned enterprises and the People’s Liberation Army. As a result, Xi claimed to have established a system in which officials “do not dare to be corrupt, cannot be corrupt, and do not think of corruption” (不敢腐、不能腐、不想腐) within the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
However, a close analysis of corruption case reports by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the CCP’s internal anti-corruption agency, reveals another trend. Among cases reported between the 18th Party Congress in 2012 and the 20th Party Congress in 2022, more than 80 percent of local leaders under the management of provincial governments (省管干部) carried out corrupt activities even after Xi launched the anti-corruption campaign.
Xiaobo Lü argued that the root cause of corruption among Chinese cadres, which predates the economic reforms of the Deng era, is the absence of clearly defined rules and regulations for the bureaucracy. As a result, local governments find room to implement policies without constraints, creating numerous opportunities for corruption throughout the policy implementation process. In essence, Lü challenged the long-held belief among generations of CCP leaders that bureaucratization leads to corruption. Instead, he asserts that it is the lack of professional bureaucratization that fosters corruption.
Similarly, Yuen Yuen Ang argued that the goal-oriented cadre evaluation system often overlooks the policy implementation process. As a result, rent-seeking during policy implementation is seen as a necessary cost to incentivize government officials to achieve policy goals.
As Xi seeks to uproot corruption within the Chinese government, he has adopted two methods. The more well-known approach, the anti-corruption campaign, aims to purge corrupt elements from the government system. The lesser-known method involves strengthening the enforcement of CCP anti-corruption regulations and supervision by routinizing audits and inspections. For Xi, the goal of the anti-corruption campaign is not a Maoist-style assault on bureaucracy but rather the construction of effective supervisory institutions that can monitor the policy implementation process. The ultimate aim is to create a standardized policy implementation process that leaves no room for rent-seeking activities.
In theory, the introduction of inspections is intended to support Xi’s anti-corruption campaign by ensuring that local governments implement policies in accordance with laws and regulations. Annual audits are also meant to verify that all government spending is legal and transparent, thereby reducing opportunities for corruption.
However, this raises an important question: what about corruption that leaves no trace?
Inspection teams focus solely on reviewing the process of implementation. Without specialized expertise, they lack the ability to scrutinize technical details, creating opportunities for local officials to conceal corrupt activities while maintaining complete files for inspection. This practice is particularly common in government procurement. Since inspection team members typically lack the technical expertise to assess pricing, they rely on documentation to justify expenditures. As long as the local government can present a complete record of a formal bidding process, the procurement is considered legitimate – regardless of whether the price has been artificially inflated.
A local government official provided an example. He questioned how the domestically made computers in his office – purchased at 13,000 yuan (around $1,800) each, far more expensive than most market alternatives – performed so poorly. Booting up took more than five minutes, and even running Microsoft Office software was a struggle. As a computer engineering major in college, he opened the system unit and was shocked by the poor-quality hardware inside. With experience assembling computers at home, he estimated that the entire system could not have cost more than 5,000 yuan.
Reflecting on this, he remarked: “The inspectors aren’t computer science majors. They don’t know computers like I do. They have no idea what a computer should cost. So if they see a properly documented bidding process, of course, they’ll assume the price is justified.”
Office computers are not the only example. The printers in his office cost over 3,000 yuan yet lacked even a scanning function, while each ink cartridge cost 500 yuan. In contrast, a basic HP printer with scanning capabilities costs around 1,000 yuan, and its ink cartridges sell for about 100 yuan. The official concluded: “If this is happening with office supplies, imagine how much money people make in construction projects. At every stage of construction, the government can inflate procurement costs, and no one will ever figure out where the extra money goes.”
The underlying reason for these schemes, he explained, is that local governments can create a perfectly legal-looking procurement process while concealing rent-seeking activities from inspections. As long as inspectors find no irregularities in the official records, they will not classify the process as illegal.
According to regulations, government contracts must be awarded through a competitive bidding process involving at least three companies. However, if the government wants to ensure a particular company wins, it instructs that company to bring two others to participate in the bid. These two additional firms – known as “also-rans” – intentionally submit inflated price bids. In return, they receive benefits from the winning company, such as cash payments or future business opportunities. These arrangements are prearranged in private before the official bidding day.
On the day of the bid, all three companies follow the formal procedures, and the preselected company is awarded the contract – often at an inflated price. Since inspection teams only review the documentation from the bidding day, as long as the process adheres to regulations on paper, the procurement is deemed legitimate. In this way, inspections actually serve to legitimize rigged bidding practices.
In addition to legitimizing corrupt activities by building comprehensive policy implementation records, another reason for the persistence of corruption is the investigators themselves. Before Xi came to power, local branches of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) operated under the leadership of local governments. Local inspectors were required to report to local leaders, making it nearly impossible to investigate their superiors for corruption.
One of Xi’s first reforms was to centralize the CCDI. Now, instead of reporting to local leaders, CCDI branches report exclusively to their vertical superiors. The goal is to make inspectors independent of those they investigate.
However, fully isolating CCDI branches from local leaders’ influence remains nearly impossible. CCDI inspectors are still embedded within local party committees, where the local party secretary holds authority. Moreover, as a former CCDI inspector noted, inspectors “eat in the local government, work in the local government, and use the local government’s cars.” She then questioned, “How can we truly be independent from the local government?”
As a result, most inspections amount to little more than a slap on the wrist, since “the main goal of the CCDI is to protect cadres rather than purge them.”
Serious investigations into local corruption still require approval from higher-level leaders. One inspector explained, “Inspectors can take down local leaders with corruption charges, but local leaders have countless ways to take an inspector down. This is the worst-case scenario because it’s a lose-lose situation.”
Inspections become another opportunity of rent-seeking. Direct bribery of inspection teams is common in many places. “Red envelopes” filled with cash are frequently distributed to inspectors during their visits.
One cadre recounted his first experience assisting with an inspection visit while working in a township government general office. During the trip, he shared a car with the director of the Township Economic Development Office, who stopped at a local Postal Bank to withdraw 20,000 yuan. Back in the car, the director handed him the cash and instructed him to divide it into red envelopes containing 6,000 yuan and 4,000 yuan each. The larger envelopes were for the inspection team captain and vice captain, while the smaller ones were for regular inspectors.
This practice was far from an isolated incident. The cadre further explained that a co-worker who frequently assisted with inspections received over 20,000 yuan in bribes each year. Since these bribes were paid in cash, they left no trace. Moreover, he noted that if the team captain accepted the red envelope, every team member was expected to accept one as well. Refusing the bribe would instantly create enemies. Ensuring that the entire inspection team became complicit reduced the likelihood of anyone turning whistleblower.
Anti-corruption was Xi’s mandate for power. The rampant corruption under Hu Jintao, symbolized by the Bo Xilai case, convinced Chinese leaders that the new CCP leadership needed the authority to tackle corruption. As a result, the urgency of addressing corruption allowed Xi to consolidate political power in his own hands. Xi seeks to build a party with strong discipline by institutionalizing internal party supervision. The goal is to further institutional development to eliminate opportunities for corruption.
However, there are limitations of this approach. Internal party supervision alone is insufficient due to inspectors’ lack of specialized expertise and the unavoidable risk of collusion between local CCDI branches and local governments.
Perhaps the only real solution to China’s corruption problem is introducing oversight from society as a whole. However, such a reform would pose a fundamental challenge to the CCP’s power.