As the anti-corruption drive cuts through China’s officialdom, dealing fatal blows to both “tigers and flies” at both the higher and grassroots levels, there is rising demand for institutional reform in managing officials.
When “tigers” as big as Zhou Yongkang, the Standing Committee member of the ruling party’s Political Bureau, and Xu Caihou, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, were accused of amassing a huge amount of wealth through bribery and embezzlement; when a host of officials at the ministerial level were charged with corruption; and when nearly one third of the top officials of Shanxi province were involved in corruption cases, the shocked public began to ask: how did these corrupt officials get selected and ascend to the top rungs of the hierarchical ladder without being rooted out earlier? Wasn’t there a mechanism to screen them and monitor their behavior? If there was one, what were the loopholes in the system?
Take the cases of Zhou and Xu. The powerful duo appointed and promoted a large number of officials to crucial posts in the military, police, judicial and economic departments, including a minister-level official in the Ministry of Public Security and a deputy chief of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission. The fact that a single person’s likes and dislikes determined the nomination of officials to the country’s defense and security organs appalled the public, who began to question China’s system for managing officials’ selection and promotion. Comments in the media and on the Internet argued that the corruption of personnel management is the most pernicious of all.
Critics also questioned the government’s financial system, which, they argued, contains loopholes that allowed corrupt officials to take bribes, trade official posts for benefits, and squander public money on feasts and pleasure-seeking.
With such a sentiment brewing in society, observers predicted that the time is ripe for China’s anti-corruption campaign to change from merely arresting corrupt officials to institutionalizing a mechanism for anti-corruption.
This change has been in the minds of President Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan, the Party guru in charge of the anti-corruption work.
When talking about China’s current anti-corruption campaign, Xi expressed his determination to crack down on “both tigers and flies” and to establish a clean government. He said: “The purpose is to ensure that our officials dare not go corrupt, cannot go corrupt and do not want to go corrupt.” This also represents the three stages of the anti-corruption campaign.
Obviously, officials “dare not go corrupt” because they are under mounting pressure from the ruthless crackdown. If they are to be “unable to go corrupt”, there should be strict rules and regulations to prevent them from adulterating their business activities with personal interests. The ways China’s officials, especially those of high rank, spend public money for half-public, half-private purposes, or even purely private purposes, are surprisingly variegated. The scenario of officials “not wanting to go corrupt” may not materialize in the near future, but it is certain that it would become true only if officials are “unable to go corrupt.”
Wang also used Chinese metaphors to explain the strategic planning of the anti-corruption campaign. He said “zhi biao” (to alleviate the symptoms of an illness) is the necessary step in the course of curing the illness before “zhi ben” (getting to the root of the problem). His idea is to use zhi biao to win time for zhi ben. That is obviously a philosophical wisdom for a most efficient deployment of force and planning of time.
His zhi biao refers to the treatment of specific persons and cases in corruption; and zhi ben is to destroy the hotbed for corruption, or to establish a complete, rigid and permanently effective system for preventing and cracking down on corruption.
Things are going that way. Xi Xinping recently disclosed how large the remuneration for leading officials of companies directly under the central government should be. The meeting did not attract much attention from observers, but it marked an important step towards institutionalizing anti-corruption efforts. It represents the central leadership’s determination to block all institutional loopholes through which groups of established interest monopolize the country’s resources, steal state wealth and squander public money in the name of the state. It is reasonable to predict that the Fourth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China this fall will focus on the establishment of an institutionalized anti-corruption mechanism for stopping loopholes in the personnel and finance management systems.
