State Auditing and Anticorruption Campaign: Evidence from China

Abstract

This study was performed to investigate the role of state auditing in the anticorruption campaign throughout the Chinese Central Government Succession substantiated in 2012. A data set of 269 state audit reports disclosed by China’s National Audit Office (CNAO) has been manually collected from the CNAO’s open access and coded into the research sample. This study reveals that the anticorruption campaign launched by the new Central Government of China is concentrating on the political path for the country’s healthy and steady socioeconomic development instead of the political purge stereotypes imposed upon it. This study shows that CNAO, which performs the state audit , follows the political directions of the renewed anticorruption campaign. These conclusions contribute to the existing audit and corruption research literature by clarifying the true motivation of the anticorruption campaign in China and the strategic role played by CNAO in governmental governance and the national anticorruption campaign during the Central Government succession.