It is well known that China has engaged in a war against corruption since the onset of reform in the late 1970s. In the existing literature, much has been said about the prevalence of corruption and the detrimental consequences it has had on contemporary China. Yet, China's corruption problem has not been carefully examined from a historical perspective, although it has been reckoned to be a major cause of the collapse of many dynasties. The extent to which corruption challenged the prevailing political order in different historical periods and the forms in which it manifested itself remain underexplored. Neither is it clear how the various regimes in Chinese history sought to control corruption and whether (and why) their anticorruption efforts succeeded or failed. If there is any source that can tell us all this, it should be Corruption and Anticorruption in Modern China, edited by Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li, with contributions from 12 scholars. The book provides a compelling overview of the complex attempts to control corruption in China's key historical periods.
The book consists of 13 chapters, which are divided into four sections under different themes. The first section focuses on “Centralized Power and Authoritarianism,” illustrating how corruption developed as an embedded structural problem in China's centralized political system. The two chapters in this section indicate that despite harsh punishments, strict rules and various reporting mechanisms, corruption prevailed in the Qing dynasty and in the early Republican period as a deeply rooted political disease. “Political Parties and Legitimacy” is the theme of the second section, in which the authors explore the implications of corruption and anticorruption efforts for the confrontation between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party in the early- and mid-20th century. Each of the three chapters in this section has a specific focus, but collectively they highlight the role that corruption and anticorruption played in the collapse of the Kuomintang regime and in power consolidation by the People's Republic of China. The coverage of the third section, “Government, Individuals, and Conflict of Interest,” is broad, with five chapters dealing with specific corruption cases or anticorruption strategies across different time periods. The last section is better focused, as its title suggests, on “New Century and New Struggle,” examining China's new and sweeping anticorruption campaign under Xi Jinping. The book concludes with a chapter by the editors on corruption as a globally thorny challenge.
The book effectively introduces the long and complex history of corruption and anticorruption in China. Frankly speaking, this is not an easy task as it is usually difficult for an edited collection to convey a single argument or message. Thanks to the hard work of the editors and contributors, the theme of this edited volume – corruption and anticorruption – is well preserved and clearly presented, despite covering various historical periods over a time span of thousands of years.
Corruption has been a recurring problem throughout Chinese history. The chapter by Stella Y. Xu shows that even during China's historical “Golden Ages,” namely the Han (206 BC–220 AD) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, the tight control over officialdom coupled with severe punishment for corrupt officials failed to prevent corruption. In China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644–1912), the situation became worse than ever. Corruption developed so rampantly that neither stringent and cruel laws nor the various reporting channels to disclose corruption ever worked, as Qiang Fang explains in his chapter. Corruption contributed to the breakup of China's dynastic cycle and continued to haunt Chinese society after the founding of the Republic. This is demonstrated in the chapters written by Sherman Xiaogang Lai and Xiaobing Li on the lost battles in the fight against corruption in the Republican era. Focusing on different historical periods, the contributors to this book illustrate with supporting evidence that corruption in China has appeared “in a variety of forms and in many fields such as government, business, academia and the judiciary” (xii). Although governments in different periods launched various top-down campaigns, and tried conventional or new measures to control corruption, “some fundamental institutional defects … have vitiated most of the efforts against bureaucratic corruption” (xxiv). In today's China, corruption remains one of the biggest challenges faced by Xi Jinping's government. Xiaoxiao Li's and Qiang Fang's chapters discuss how China's new leadership has fought an old battle against corruption and the ways in which anti-corruption efforts have been made by the current leadership, but the authors share the same concern that institutional flaws embedded in the political system may hinder the government's efforts.
There is no doubt that the book is an important contribution to corruption studies and the study of Chinese history. As the first book focusing on corruption and anticorruption in the entire period of modern China from mainly the late Qing to the present (with the exception of the chapter on the Tang and Han dynasties), the book reveals the change and continuity in the causes, forms and consequences of corruption and in anticorruption dynamics, strategies and outcomes. The book also demonstrates the authors’ in-depth research and meticulous treatment of empirical evidence. The analyses presented in individual chapters are evidence-based, using latest sources of information, newly discovered archive materials and carefully selected cases. As a whole, the book contains rich empirical information, much of which has not been used previously.
It is also worth noting that the book is not just about Chinese history. By engaging in an historical analysis of the success and failure of dynastic anticorruption campaigns, the book intends to shed light on the nature and likely outcome of China's ongoing drive against corruption (p. xxiv). The theoretical and practical implications of the book are strengthened by its critique of conventional views of Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign, by a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between China's current anticorruption efforts and some previous notable attempts to curb corruption in the Tang, Ming and Qing dynasties, and by placing the corruption problem in the global context.
The book will be an essential source of reference for not only students of China studies, but also students of history and political science, and anyone else who is interested in using history as a tool to understand contemporary China.
