Anti-corruption mechanisms in China after the supervision law

Abstract

Corruption is one of the thorny issues in any modern society, especially in China. The new leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by President Xi Jinping robustly initiated an anti-corruption campaign as soon as he took over as the party chief in the end of 2012. Several legal reforms aiming at fighting harder against corruption crimes drew attention from home and abroad, including foreign investors. These reforms include the enactment of the National Supervision Law in 2018, the establishment of a special proceeding of confiscation of illegal gains in the 2012 amendment to Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), and the introduction of “trial in absentia” procedure in the 2018 CPL amendment. Another ongoing reform is the corporate compliance non-prosecution pilot. China used to adopt a dual-penalty approach upon corporate crimes, imposing punishments on both the directly responsible persons and the enterprises. However, the traditional sanction against enterprises tends to cause secondary harms to the society. For example, when a corporation goes bankrupt, thousands of innocent people will be unemployed. Therefore, non-prosecution might be a more effective way of ensuring corporate compliance as well as minimalizing the harms mentioned above. This paper explores the anti-corruption mechanisms Chinese government has created or improved over the past decade and attempts to provide a bird’s eye view of China’s anti-corruption law.