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Who steals? Who bribes? Multilevel determinants of corruption types in China

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Abstract

Numerous studies have pointed out that as the political and economic environment changes, the structures of corruption in China are constantly evolving. Specifically, the transaction-type corruption has surged and the auto-corruption ( non-transactional administrative corruption) has receded. As such, what kind of structural characteristics does China’s corruption types present today? What factors can help us explain the variances of these structural characteristics? Drawn on the quantitative analysis of a novel dataset, this study found that: in terms of personal traits, the gender of the defendant and urban–rural residence have a significant impact on the type of corruption; in the macro-institutional environment, the development of private economy and the size of the government have opposite effects on the composition of the corruption type. Privatization increases the probability of transaction-type corruption. The size of the government increases the probability of auto-corruption.

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Data Availability

The data support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

  1. According to Heidenheimer’s (2007) typology, corruption can be categorized as black, gray and white according to the tolerance of the elite and the masses. “Black corruption” is a particular action that both elite and masses would condemn, and “white corruption” is an action that the majority of the elite and the masses would regard as tolerable. As Lu (2000) indicates, organizational corruption refers to the action of a public agency that exploits its power for the monetary or material gains for the organization, but not for any particular individual. Nyblade and Reed distinguished two types of corruption among Japanese politicians: “‘Cheating’ is the use of illicit means to enhance one’s probability of being (re)elected. …… ‘Looting’ is defined as the use of public office illicitly for private material gain.”(Nyblade & Reed, 2008: 927).

  2. There is no regular statistics on the actual number of the officials in China. According to a report released by Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in 2015, there were 7.167 million civil servants nationwide, and 10% of them were deputy head at county level (Xian Chu Ji) or above, which are usually regarded as “officers” in China.

  3. The news report citing statement from officials of Supreme Court of China during the National People's Congress in 2022, available in http://lianghui.people.com.cn/2022npc/n1/2022/0309/c442099-32371013.html (in Chinese).

  4. The official website of the Supreme People's Procuratorate: http://www.ajxxgk.jcy.cn/html/zjxflws/.

  5. The National Supervisory Commission (NSC) is the highest anti-corruption agency of the People's Republic of China, at the same administrative ranking as the Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate. The NSC was appointed by the 13th National People’s Congress in 2018.

  6. "The village official swallowed 150 million in 18 years, and the huge corrupt village official Liu Dawei's assets began." Daily Financial Network, May 8, 2017, http://www.mrcjcn.com/n/223494.html/4.

  7. "Official small greed! Heilongjiang Yicun branch book greedy more than 200 million, misappropriation of public funds 85.2 million", August 13, 2017, http://www.sohu.com/a/164286193_778757.

  8. Data can be accessed from “China Private Economy Report (2019)”, https://news.futunn.com/post/3986708.

  9. The release of the indictment document is an incremental process. We start to scrape the text late 2015. We first spent 3 months developing the data collection tool and then we have been scraping the text on a daily base until mid-2018.

  10. See the White Paper on Gender Equality and Women's Development in China (2015), available at http://f.china.com.cn/2017-11/21/content_50065765.htm.

  11. The term frequency–inverse document frequency (tf-idf), currently one of the most commonly used term-weighting schemes. It is a statistical index that is intended to reflect the importance a word to a document in a collection or corpus.

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Funding

National Social Science Fund of China (18BZZ071), Dr. Hui Li ; Humanities and Social Sciences Fund from the Ministry of Education of China (19YJCZH217), Dr. Xiaoguang Yang; Inner Mongolia Discipline Inspection and Supervision Big Data Laboratory Annual Open Project(2021-2022) (IMDBD202103), Dr. Hui Li

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Room 825, No.299, Guonian Road, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Hui Li

  2. China Hospital Development Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, No. 227 South Chongqing Road, 200025, Shanghai, China

    Xiaoguang Yang

Authors
  1. Hui Li
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Correspondence to Xiaoguang Yang.

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Appendices

Appendix 1 Official names of corruption crimes

The table below lists the definition of the corruption names appeared in the paper, citing from the English version of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China. We also put the corresponding name of the crimes in Chinese for further reference.

Name of crime

Official description of the crime

Names of crimes in Chinese

Embezzlement

State personnel who take advantage of their office to misappropriate, steal, swindle or use other illegal means to acquire state properties constitute the crime of graft

贪污罪

Misappropriating public funds,

State personnel who take advantage of their office and misappropriate public funds for personal use or illegal activities or misappropriate large amounts of public funds without returning the money within three months are guilty of the crime of embezzlement

挪用公款罪

Accepting bribes,

State personnel who take advantage of their office to demand money and things from other people or if they illegally accept money and things from other people and give favors to the latter are guilty of the crime of bribery

受贿罪

Accepting bribes by an entity,

State organs, state-owned companies, enterprises, institutions, and people's organizations which exact or illegally accept articles of property from other people and try to obtain gain for other people

单位受贿罪

Taking bribes by making use of the influence of state functionaries,

Where any close relative of a state functionary or any other person who has a close relationship with the said state functionary seeks any improper benefit for a requester for such a benefit through the official act of the said state functionary or through the official act of any other state functionary by using the advantages generated from the authority or position of the said state functionary, and asks or accepts property from the requester for such a benefit, and the amount is relatively large or there is any other relatively serious circumstance

利用影响力受贿罪

Offering bribes,

An act of giving state functionaries articles of property in order to seek illegitimate gain

行贿罪

Offering bribes to a person with the influence of state functionaries,

Whoever, for the purpose of seeking illicit benefits, offers bribe to any close relative of an employee of a state functionary or any other person who has a close relationship with the said employee of the state authority, or any dismissed employee of a state authority or any of his or her close relatives or any other person who has a close relationship with the said employee

对有影响力的人行贿罪

Offering bribes to an entity,

Whoever offers property to any state authority, state-owned company, enterprise, public institution or people's organization for the purpose of seeking illicit benefits or offers commission or handling charges in any name in violation of the provisions of the state in economic exchanges

对单位行贿罪

Bribing as an intermediary,

introduces bribery to any employee of a state authority

介绍贿赂罪

Offering bribes by an entity,

Where any entity offers bribes for the purpose of seeking illicit benefits or offers commission or handling charges to any employee of a state authority in violation of the provisions of the state shall, if the circumstances are serious, be sentenced to a fine, and the directly responsible person in charge and other directly liable persons

单位行贿罪

Concealing foreign deposits,

State functionaries who have savings deposits in foreign countries must declare their deposits according to state provisions. Those who hide their deposits of this nature by not declaring them

隐瞒境外存款罪,

Privately dividing state property,

State organs, state-owned companies, enterprises, business units, and mass organizations which violate state regulations by privately distributing state assets to groups of individuals in the name of the units, where the amounts involved are fairly large

私分国有资产罪

Privately dividing confiscated property

Judicial organizations and administrative and law enforcement organizations which violate state stipulations by privately distributing to groups of individuals fines and confiscated goods

私分罚没财物罪

Appendix 2 Introduction of the China’s provincial marketization index

China's provincial marketization index (referred to as the "marketization index") is an index system that measures the relative marketization progress of various provinces across the country in the form of an index in each year since 1997. The overall provincial index ranges from 0 to 10, and the higher the index, the more marketed the given province is.

The raw data composing the marketization index come from two sources, namely the official provincial statistics by the government, and the data obtained from the sample survey of enterprises across the country. The raw data of different sources are standardized and calibered according to a unified method to form a horizontally and vertically comparable index. For some sub-indices, the underlying data for some years are not available, and data from previous years are used.

The index is composed of five aspects. Each aspect index reflects a specific aspect of marketization. The five aspect indices are composed of several sub-indices. The main aspect and first level sub-aspect are listed below.

  1. 1.

    The relationship between the government and the market.

    1a Proportion of economic resources allocated by the market

    1b Reduce government intervention in business

    1c Reduce the size of government

  2. 2.

    Development of non-state-owned economy

    2a Proportion of non-state-owned economy in industrial sales revenue

    2b Proportion of non-state-owned economy in total investment in fixed assets

    2c Proportion of non-state-owned economy in urban employment

  3. 3.

    Development of the product market

    3a The extent to which prices are determined by the market

    3b Reduce local protection in commodity markets

    3c Fair market conditions of competition

  4. 4.

    The degree of development of the factor market

    4a Marketization of the financial industry

    4b Human resource supply conditions

    4c Marketization of technical achievements

  5. 5.

    Development of market intermediary organizations and legal system environment

    5a Development of market intermediaries

    5b Maintain the legal environment of the market

    5c intellectual property protection

More Information is available on the website of the database (in Chinese): https://cmi.ssap.com.cn/instruction

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Li, H., Yang, X. Who steals? Who bribes? Multilevel determinants of corruption types in China. Crime Law Soc Change 80, 125–152 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10070-x

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