Discipline Inspection Commission Research Articles

The Political Limits of China’s Anti-Corruption Reform: An Institutional Analysis of the New Supervision Commission

ABSTRACT In November 2016, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) undertook a new reform to ‘crush’ corruption by creating a sole and unified state-ranked Supervision Commission (SC). This reform incorporated the anti-corruption bureau of procuratorate into the SC, merging it with the upgraded Supervision Department of the government and the Discipline Inspection Commission (DIC) system of the CCP to address the weakness in the anti-corruption apparatus stemming from its lack of authority, as well as its internal fragmentation and redundancies. The reform was highly praised in the official media, and it gave more authority to the state’s anti-corruption agencies. However, the reform did not address the subordination of these agencies to the local DICs, which, in turn, remain significantly under the influence of the local party-state leadership through personnel, financial and operational channels. As a result, the reform has failed to free the anti-corruption apparatus from the direct influence of the leaders it is supposed to supervise. The author concludes that the reform has simply transferred power from procuratorates to the DICs, thereby strengthening the party’s direct control over anti-corruption apparatus, instead of providing additional ways to control party leaders. Therefore, the SC is unlikely to curb corruption systematically in China.

Enforcement and Political Power in Anticorruption—Evidence from China

Summary Few empirical studies focused on the role of officials in the anticorruption enforcement, especially in the authoritarian regime. This paper uses linear panel data models with various control variables to investigate how the power of the government official in an anticorruption agency may impact the effectiveness of anticorruption campaign in China. Two types of political power are considered. Formal power is obtained when the Discipline Inspection Secretary is also named as a Vice Party Secretary of the province whereas informal power arises when the Secretary used to work with the Party Secretary of the province. It is found that both the formal and informal power of the Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s Discipline Inspection Commission (i.e., the head of the anticorruption agency) help enhance the number of corruption cases under investigation. This result offers evidence to further explore how and why the anticorruption enforcement officials play their roles in a developing transitional country.

Are foreign monks better at chanting? The effect of ‘airborne’ SDICs on anti-corruption

The independence of supervision agency is of great importance for anti-corruption. After the leadership transition of the provincial Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2006, Secretaries of Discipline Inspection Commission (SDICs) were suddenly dispatched from the centre or transferred from another province in China (‘airborne’ SDICs) to enhance their independence in inspecting corruption cases. To investigate the effect of this policy reform, we collect data of SDICs and anti-corruption in 31 provinces from 2003 to 2014, and evaluate this policy using the difference-in-differences econometrics method. We find that there is no significant effect of these ‘airborne’ SDICs whether from the centre or another province on anti-corruption. This result is robust to different measurements of anti-corruption and subsamples. We argue that the dispatch of external SDICs is not enough to ensure the independence of supervision agency, because local discipline inspection commissions (DICs) are still subject to local Chinese Communist Party committees in terms of personnel, funds and property. This paper has important policy implications for the current anti-corruption campaign in China.

The Rule of Law with Xi-Era Characteristics: Law for Economic Reform, Anticorruption, and Illiberal Politics

The Rule of Law with Xi-Era Characteristics:Law for Economic Reform, Anticorruption, and Illiberal Politics Jacques Delisle (bio) Xi Jinping and China’s fifth-generation leadership have given law even greater pride of place in official rhetoric than their predecessors did. The October 2014 Fourth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee—widely dubbed the “rule of law plenum”—declared the rule of law to be a guiding force in pursuing the Chinese Communist Party’s major tasks, including economic development, political modernization, and realization of Xi’s “China dream.” After the Fourth Plenum, Xi included “comprehensively governing the country according to law” among his “Four Comprehensives,” which also included other goals that law is expected to advance (deepening reform, building prosperity, and limiting party misbehavior). These statements amplified earlier commitments to law, including Xi’s declaration in 2012 on the 30th anniversary of the 1982 constitution that China “must firmly establish throughout society, the authority of the constitution and the law,” and the seminal Third Plenum’s pledges in 2013 to “move forward with building a rule of law country,” “strengthen rule of law guarantees,” and “safeguard the authority of the constitution and the laws.”1 This emphasis on law contrasts with decline in official support for law during much of the Hu Jintao period, which was marked by an emphasis on informal dispute resolution, skepticism toward the idea that the courts should be guided primarily by law, and an apparent sense that law had failed to fulfill its promise in advancing the regime’s aims. At the same time, one of the most dramatic initiatives of Xi’s early tenure—a remarkably energetic drive against corruption—has been conducted primarily through the party’s extralegal discipline inspection commission under the leadership of Politburo Standing Committee member and venerable regime trouble-shooter Wang Qishan. Advocates of [End Page 23] more robust constitutionalism, rights protection lawyers, and law-focused NGOs have all faced heightened repression since Xi came to power. These seemingly contradictory trends are consistent with a relatively coherent conception of law’s roles that has deep roots in the reform era and has been evolving under Xi. Throughout the Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao periods, law came to be expected to perform—and to some extent did perform—supporting functions for the regime’s core agenda: providing frameworks for market-oriented, internationally open development strategies; checking potentially development-subverting misbehavior, much of it by party-state or state-linked actors; and preempting pressures for democratic reform. Incipient and likely non-transformative changes in law’s mandate under Xi point toward a legal order that is still reformist and developmentalist (in its notion of law’s role in the economy), more legalist (that is, giving law a larger role in some, but not all, areas), and more Leninist (in the sense of being less liberal, more top-down, and more narrowly instrumentalist). As the sections of this essay examine in turn, the fifth-generation leadership’s strategy appears to imply a large role for law in economic reform, a limited but perhaps growing role for law in addressing corruption and other party-state-based threats to economic development and effective governance, and a mostly, but not entirely, repressive role for law in handling pressures for political change. As this essay also discusses, factors beyond Chinese leaders’ control constrain their options in “ruling the country according to law.” Although the elite’s plans for legal change may fall far short of full implementation and are subject to revision, these measures—and the context in which they must be pursued—do show that there is room in China’s legal universe in the Xi era to increase reliance on law, even if anticorruption campaigns leave little room for law and the political environment is hostile to liberal notions of legality and their advocates. Law and Economic Reform Much of the reinvigorated endorsement of ruling through law focuses on economic reforms to sustain development in the more challenging circumstances of a “new normal” that has entailed a much flatter growth curve. Tellingly, the agenda for law proffered at the Fourth Plenum was foreshadowed in the preceding year’s Third Plenum...

Assessing the Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party: Personnel Management and Corruption

The annual plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) usually follow a fixed pattern. The first plenary session of a newly elected Central Committee appoints the new party leadership, including the new general secretary of the CCP. The second plenary session, held in the spring before the annual meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC), reviews and approves the composition of the new government. The third plenary session addresses basic issues and the party's policy directions on economic development and reform. The fourth plenary session usually includes party building at the top of the agenda, while the fifth plenary session deliberates on a draft of the upcoming five-year plan that is formally adopted at the annual meeting of the NPC. The sixth plenary session often focuses on cultural themes and broad societal goals such as creating a harmonious society or adhering to the concept of scientific development. The seventh plenary session, held a few weeks before the opening of the next National Party Congress, approves the agenda of the event as well as the various reports to be presented to the party congress.Although the fourth plenary session usually discusses party building, law and legal work were the main topics at this meeting in 2014. The result was a major document entitled of the CCP Central Committee Concerning Some Major Questions in Comprehensively Moving Governing the Country Forward According to the Law (henceforth referred to as the Decision).1 This document should be regarded as an extension into the legal area of the ambitious reform proposals adopted at the third plenary session in November 2013.2 According to some scholars and observers, these proposals are perhaps indicative of the most far-reaching reform initiative since the landmark Third Plenum in December 1978 that inaugurated the post-Mao reform process.3This essay will first discuss the nature and importance of party documents in China. Second, it analyzes the impact of the Fourth Plenum Decision on personnel management in the legal system, arguing that a recentralization of power and authority is taking place. Third, the essay briefly examines the ongoing anticorruption campaign. Finally, it concludes by arguing that recent legal reforms do not intend to reduce the party's power and instruments of control. On the contrary, the leading role of the CCP is regarded by the Chinese leadership as a necessary precondition for legal reform.Drafting the DecisionDrafting major Chinese policy documents is a protracted and complicated process that involves numerous individuals and institutions. According to Xi Jinping's own lengthy explanation of the process, work on the Decision began in January 2014.4 At a Politburo meeting it was decided that the upcoming fourth plenary session of the Central Committee should focus on legal affairs. Following the Politburo meeting, a drafting group was formed with Xi as head and NPC chairman Zhang Dejiang and Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) chairman Wang Qishan as deputy heads. In addition, approximately 70 leading officials from relevant central and provincial departments participated. The drafting group held its first meeting in February 2014, and over the next eight months the full Politburo held two meetings and the Politburo Standing Committee met three times to discuss the work of the drafting group. In his explanation of the process, Xi underlined that the drafting group had consulted retired party leaders as well.5 Xi was also the head of the group that developed the reform document for the Third Plenum in November 2013. This indicates his crucial role not only in setting out overall policy guidelines but also in actual policymaking and drafting key documents.There is a hierarchy among Chinese documents. The most important are signed and circulated by party organizations. Recent regulations for selecting and appointing leading cadres, for example, are circulated by the Central Organization Department of the CCP. …

Controlling Corruption in the Party: China's Central Discipline Inspection Commission

AbstractThis article investigates a prominent but little discussed CCP central organ, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), and its local discipline inspection commissions (DICs) in the post-Mao era. It analyses how the CCP exerts its control over the disciplinary organizations and argues that the disciplinary agencies' lack of autonomy hinders their efforts to crack down on corruption. This article investigates the important role played by the CDIC in CCP politics by examining its organizational structure, modes of operation and criteria for imposing disciplinary sanctions, and evaluates the measures and approaches employed by the Party's disciplinary organizations to combat corruption. The study concludes that structural, institutional and cultural factors hinder the effectiveness of the CCP's disciplinary agencies in their efforts to control Party members, officials and corruption.

A New Impetus for the Fight Against Corruption

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Analysis by Jerome Doyon based on:- Ren Zhongyuan, (1) ... (Systematic separation of powers and ensuring autonomous supervision of the anticorruption fight), Xin shiji, 31 December 2012.- Zhang Weiying, (2) ... (Two choices for the fight against corruption), speech during the second session of the Jingjiguangcha Bao annual conference on reforms in China, held on 19 December in Beijing, reported by Xinlang Caijing, 19 December 2012.- Chen Baocheng, (3) ... (New anticorruption dynamics), Xin shiji, 31 December 2012.- Hu Shuli, (4) ... (Ease and difficulties in the anticorruption fight), Xin shiji, 17 December 2012.- Yang Minzhi, (5) ... (Liming powers and then resuming the anticorruption fight), Caijing, 10 December 2012.- Wang Jing, (6) ... (Advances in Guangdong's policy of 'the Party's strict supervision'), Xin shiji, 7 December 2012.The 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to have opened new chapter in the history of anticorruption struggles in the People's Republic. The dismissal of Li Chuncheng, deputy Party chief of Sichuan, 22 days after his inclusion as an alternate member of the Party's Central Committee illustrates how times have changed. Never in the past ten years has an alternate member been dismissed so quickly. Xi Jinping's new eight rules for rectifying cadres' behaviour - especially the one simplifying the style of official meetings and limiting extravagance in receptions - also symbolise this trend.!7)While corruption is an old phenomenon, Ren Zhongyuan notes new initiatives that came about in 2012. The Party leadership appears increasingly aware of the extent of the problem and the consequences for its own future if nothing is done. Besides, some major cases such as the Bo Xilai affair are particularly highlighted, despite their rarity. Xin Shiji notes that Bo was only the third Politburo member to be dismissed since 1992. The Internet and microblogs have central place in the anticorruption fight, which raises the issue of the use of such information and its interaction with the CCP's internal mechanisms.Leaders' awareness and pressure from the InternetGiven the rising number of cases and steep inflation of sums involved, corruption among cadres constitutes major challenge for the Party's new leadership. According to Yang Minzhi, former head of the Hunan provincial discipline inspection commission, the central commission's report to the 18th Party Congress noted 643,759 corruption cases between November 2007 and June 2012. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Blue Book on Fighting Corruption and Upholding Integrity, national-level supervision organs received as many as 1,345,814 complaints in 2011 alone.Zhang Weiying notes that on the popular news website Baidu Xinwen, the number of articles tackling the anticorruption topic rose from 11,900 in 2003 to 76,200 in 2004 and reached 246,000 articles in 2010. Similar evolution was evident on the People's Daily website.The number of corruption cases, measures to deal with the scourge, and media reports on such affairs has been rising. This coincides with increasing awareness in the top leadership, as confirmed by former General Secretary Hu Jintao at the 18th Party Congress, when he declared that corruption was a matter of life and death for the Party and the country. Zhang Weiying comments ironically on this assessment with popular formula: Inaction will kill the country but the anticorruption campaign will kill the Party. Even though, to him, the country is not in danger, it is time to engage in saving the Party through frontal attack on corruption in its ranks.In Zhang's view, corruption has not only grown exponentially, but its nature has also changed over the past ten years. In the spirit of Kellee Tsai's work, Zhang describes the passage from reforming and value-adding corruption to conservative and counterproductive one. …

Corruption and Market in Contemporary China. By YAN SUN. [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 272 pp. Hard cover $49.95, ISBN 0-8014-4284-2; paperback $21.00, ISBN 0-8-8014-8942-3.

In Corruption and Market in Contemporary China, Yan Sun seeks to describe, in qualitative terms, corruption in post-Mao China and assess its consequences. Corruption is not, she argues, a unitary phenomena but rather consists of a variety of different forms of malfeasance whereby officials use the public authority granted them by right of their positions to seek private gains. Differences in form imply differences in result. Thus, we might presume it makes a difference if an official loots the treasury and absconds to the Cayman Islands or if she accepts a minor bribe in return for granting a business licence to an entrepreneur who goes on to establish a flourishing business empire.In trying to describe Chinese corruption, Sun faces a Herculean task. Since 1979, the Ministry of Supervision and the Party's Discipline Inspection Commission have disciplined three million cadres and the judicial Procuratorate has prosecuted one million cases of economic and disciplinary crime. Even given detailed and systematic data, the task of cataloguing the multitudinous forms of corruption and then characterizing them into a manageable typology would be a formidable analytic task. Such data are, however, lacking. Sun is therefore forced to turn to case data drawn from a variety of compilations and collections. These data are problematic – as Sun recognizes – because of sampling error and selection bias.Using her database (which consists of approximately 1,300 mostly senior-level cases), supplemented by data from official and unofficial Chinese sources, Sun breaks corruption down into two major categories, transactive and nontransactive, differentiating between exchanges between state officials and private interests (e.g. bribery), and the theft of state assets by officials (e.g. embezzlement). She then disaggregates these categories into 11 subcategories and 27 specific forms. She further differentiates between two periods (pre-1992 and post-1992) and breaks corruption down along regional lines.

No Intervention in the Job Assignment of College Graduates

Abstract New China News Agency Dispatch from Beijing, July 5: The CCP Central Discipline Inspection Commission issued on July 3 a "Circular on No Intervention in the Job Assignment of College Graduates."

China: Modernization and "Unhealthy Tendencies"

Beginning in the summer of 1984, and continuing down to the recent sixth plenum of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) twelfth central committee, the Chinese press has revealed a persistent concern on the part of the leadership of the CPC with the appearance of arising in the wake of recent economic reforms. Throughout 1985, serious concern was evident as the problem was addressed at various times by the CPC central committee (CC), the CPC CC discipline inspection commission, the CPC central commission for guiding party rectification, the state council, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang, among many others. The year 1986 likewise witnessed scores of reports of economic corruption and other behavior, as well as a number of highly publicized cases of corruption involving officials, party cadre, and the relatives of high-ranking Communist Party officials. While bearing certain similarities to the earlier campaign against spiritual pollution, the campaign against tendencies has had a fundamentally different target. The spiritual pollution campaign attacked a wide range of behavior associated with moral and spiritual decay. The campaign against tendencies has been aimed at undesirable behavior on the part of party and government cadres and officials and thus bears similarity to the earlier problems of corruption in the PRC studied by Alan P. L. Liu.3 Because the are said to involve an erosion of party spirit and discipline within the ruling elite itself, concern with arresting and reversing the unhealthy occasionally assumes a tone of urgency. The dangers inherent in the continuation of the present trend are apparently perceived as real and substantial. Indeed, it is frequently suggested that, if the problem can not be effectively dealt with, economic reform and the four modernizations (of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and the military) may be difficult or impossible to achieve. In the following pages I propose to examine these new tendencies as they are reported and discussed in the Chinese press. I will suggest that the leaders of the CPC appear to have little real understanding of the underlying causes--as contrasted with the

Discipline Inspection: Doing It Well

Comrades: Today we are holding the Second Plenary Session of the Central Discipline Inspection Commission. The main topics for discussion at this session are: further implementing the guidelines of the Thirteenth Party Congress, doing a good job of discipline inspection under the conditions of reform and opening to the outside world, and making the necessary arrangements for these purposes. This session was convened immediately after the Second Plenary Session of the Thirteenth Party Central Committee. The Second Plenary Session was a great success. It examined, discussed, and approved the name lists of leading personnel of state organs to be recommended to the First Session of the Seventh National People's Congress and leading personnel of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Consultative Conference to be recommended to the Presidium of the First Session of the CPPCC National Committee. Moreover, it set forth important opinions on further implementing the guidelines set at the Thirteenth CPC National Congress. It stressed the need to further emancipate the mind, stabilize the economy, deepen the reform, liberate to a still greater extent the productive forces in our country, and, at the same time, strengthen the building of the party itself. We should study earnestly the documents of that session to improve our implementation of the guidelines of the Thirteenth Party Congress in the process of our discipline inspection work. …

Such a "Yellow Card" is Undesirable

A newspaper published the following: The Hefei City Discipline Inspection Commission, Anhui province, recently sent ‘yellow card’ warnings to eight party member cadres who had contravened party discipline and refused to acknowledge a mistake, requiring them quickly to correct their mistakes. Otherwise, party disciplinary action would be taken against them. (See Renmin ribao, 23 February, p. 1.)

Assault on the Reforms: Conservative Criticism of Political and Economic Liberalization in China, 1985–86

Following Hu Yaobang's resignation as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party on 16 January 1987, the political and economic reforms sponsored by Deng Xiaoping since 1978 came under intense criticism. Warning against “bourgeois liberalization” and renewed “spiritual pollution” from the west, Party conservatives reacted to student demonstrations in December 1986 by reversing the “Double Hundred” policy of literary and scientific freedom and by engineering the purge of the ardent westernizers Fang Lizhi, Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang. Deng Liqun's “Leading Group to Oppose Bourgeois Liberalism,” Chen Yun's Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), and the outspoken Peng Zhen emerged as the main ideological watchdogs favouring restrictions on individual expression. But even the pro-reformer Zhao Ziyang condemned western ideas as “pernicious,” just as his chief secretary Bao Tong, warned intellectuals against “writ[ing] only about (the merits) of developed capitalist countries.”