Dan Hough

Opinion | 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

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).

China ended up with 41 points, sharing 80th place with India and Morocco. This is a two-point improvement on 2018’s score of 39 and, simply, further evidence of its trendless fluctuation around the 40-point mark. China scored 41 points in 2017, 40 points in 2016, and 39 points in 2015. That pattern goes all the way back to 2012, when China again scored 39 points.

Transparency International’s data is clearly far from perfect. Measuring corruption is at best an inexact science. Corruption comes in many shapes and sizes and every country has its own particular cocktail of problems. Given that, can we really be sure, for example, that India and China deserve the same score? Or indeed China and Benin, another country that got 41 points?