7-13 January 2024

Commentary

Topping last week’s most widely circulated articles in China’s official media was a report of a speech made by Xi Jinping to a plenary session of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. The report notes:

[Xi] emphasized that after ten years of unremitting and powerful anti-corruption [activities] in the New Era, the anti-corruption struggle had achieved an overwhelming victory and had been comprehensively consolidated, but the situation remained grim and complex.

Understanding how an overwhelming victory can leave a grim and complex situation calls for reading Yuen Yuen Ang’s excellent book, China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

In her book, Ang explores how corruption in China centres on access payments, or how businesses ensure they have all the necessary approvals for projects by paying off officials with decision-making powers.

Unlike the other forms of corruption Ang identifies (petty theft, grand theft, speed money), such bribes can play an important role in ensuring things happen. Indeed, as Ang notes, they played a major role in supporting China’s high economic growth rate of the last few decades.

The downside of access payments is that they distort economic activity, concentrating it certain sectors at the expense of broader economic development. In China’s case, that meant the overdevelopment of infrastructure and real estate.

Now, with its economy weakening, more companies failing and many local governments struggling with their financing, evidence of illegal behaviour that could previously be ignored is surfacing.

In the first nine months of last year, discipline inspection and supervision agencies investigated 54 officials supervised by the CPC’s Central Committee, 2,480 officials at department and bureau level, and more than 20,000 officials at county and division level, according to the State Council.

Xi’s financial anti-corruption campaign, launched in 2019, also claimed more scalps than ever before, with investigations of 75 officials at regulatory bodies, banks or other financial institutions.

Given the tone of Xi’s speech, 2024 looks set to be a year when more great victories are recorded in China’s struggle with corruption. But given the deterioration of the economy, it could also be one when its underlying situation is discovered to be even grimmer and more complex than previously imagined.

Weekly newsletter tracking high-level policy signals sent by China’s top leaders. For more information, visit About Five Things.

Top-ranked articles for 7-13 January 2024
% = percentage of publications monitored carrying the article

1. Deepen the party’s self-revolution and resolutely win the protracted struggle against corruption
深入推进党的自我革命 坚决打赢反腐败斗争攻坚战持久战Xinhua News Agency, 8 January 2024
Chinese / Machine translation / 36%

2. Always on the road
永远在路上
Xinhua News Agency, 7 January 2024
Chinese / Machine translation / 31%

3. Communiqué of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China
中国共产党第二十届中央纪律检查委员会第三次全体会议公报
Xinhua News Agency, 10 January 2024
Chinese / Machine translation / 31%

4. 习近平会见比利时首相德克罗
Xi Jinping meets with Belgian Prime Minister De Croo
Xinhua News Agency, 12 January 2024
Chinese / Machine translation / 26%

5. Xi Jinping held talks with Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu
习近平同马尔代夫总统穆伊兹会谈
Xinhua News Agency, 10 January 2024
Chinese / Machine translation / 25%

For more information about Five Things on China’s Leader’s Minds, visit About Five Things on China’s Leaders’ Minds or email fivethings@bilby.ai.