Institutional Reform in Support of Xi’s Anti-Corruption Campaign
Corruption remains a pervasive challenge that distorts markets, undermines public service delivery, destabilizes social order, and erodes governmental legitimacy. In China, anti-corruption has been a recurring policy priority since 1949, culminating in Xi Jinping’s sweeping campaign launched in late 2012. Conceptualizing corruption through a principal–agent framework, this dissertation argues Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign represents not merely an institutional inflection point in China’s supervisory architecture substantially enhancing enforcement capacity and elite discipline, but also the enforcement–perception interactive change, reproducing an asymmetry between punishment and public perception under the unvarying political foundation. This study employs a multi-method research design that integrates institutional analysis with time-series econometrics to examine both the organizational transformation and empirical effects of the campaign. Qualitatively, it traces the consolidation of disciplinary and administrative supervision under a unified authority, highlighting the empowerment of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and the establishment of the National Supervisory Committee (NSC). These reforms significantly expanded the scope of supervision and enhanced the state’s capacity to detect and discipline official misconduct. Quantitatively, the dissertation analyzes temporal dynamics in the Bayesian Corruption Index (BCI) and in investigations of high-ranking officials (“tigers”), identifying constructed counterfactuals, robust structural breaks, slope reversal and joint action changes between the two that mostly distinguish the post-2013 period from earlier tracks. By integrating organizational transformation with observable empirical patterns, this study demonstrates a systematic and statistically significant departure from pre-2012 patterns, confirming that Xi’s campaign constitutes an institutional inflection point in the Chinese bureaucratic governance. At the same time, the analysis reveals a persistent long-term relation between corruption and elite prosecution, and asymmetric short-term interplay. While Xi’s anti-corruption drive has institutionalized oversight and reinforced administrative discipline, comparative experience suggests genuine rule-of-law and participatory governance—features largely absent from China’s current political system—typify the durable victory of corruption control. Without deeper political reform, the long-term efficacy of the campaign remains uncertain despite its substantial short-term gains.
Chinese politics, corruption, governance, multi-method research, public policy, time-series analysis
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