Anticorruption Campaigns and the Intensification of Corruption in China

Despite repeated crackdowns, over the past two decades corruption in China has become steadily more ‘intense’ as the amounts of corrupt monies and the number of senior cadres implicated in corruption have increased dramatically, leading many to view China's ‘war on corruption’ as half-hearted and ineffectual. In this article, I analyze the efficacy of China's campaign-style anticorruption strategy using a combination of formal modeling and empirical data. The analysis suggests that while this sort of strategy may succeed in keeping corruption ‘under control’, it is likely to do so by deterring low-level corruption, but not high-level, high stakes corruption, and may encourage inflation of the size of bribes. The article thus concludes that campaign-style enforcement may have actually contributed to the ‘intensification’ of corruption.