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Tigers vs. flies: impact of official ranks on judicial trials in PRC’s anti-corruption campaign

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Abstract

Corruption in People’s Republic of China (PRC) has worsened and become widespread and deeply rooted at all levels of the government for decades. Since President Xi Jinping came to power, a new anti-corruption campaign has been waged against both ‘tigers and flies’, and many ‘big tigers’ have been brought down. The new campaign raises important questions about the efficacy of institutional management and regulations to control corruption. Yet, empirical studies on judicial trials and sentencing of corrupt officials in China are sparse. Based on a random sample of three corruption crimes (misappropriation of public funds, embezzlement, and bribe-taking) adjudicated in 2016, this study empirically examines potential impact of one’s official rank on both judicial processing and sentencing. The results showed that one’s official rank makes potential differences in embezzlement and bribe-taking. In general, higher official rankers are associated with prolonged judicial processing and harsher punishment, which lends support to an exemplary model official theory. This study shed significant light to our understanding of China’s judicial campaign against corruption offenders.

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Notes

  1. The Chinese cadre system is composed of hierarchical grades (ji) of positions, ranging from no rank, to section-head levels (ke ji, e.g., township heads and CEO of state-owned enterprises), to division-head levels (chu ji, e.g., heads of offices of State Council ministries and chiefs of county governments), and to bureau-director levels (ting ju ji, e.g., heads of bureaus of State Council ministries, departmental heads of provincial governments, and chief executive officers of large state-owned enterprises) and above.

  2. Information reported on the official website of the People’s Courts (http://www.chinacourt.org/article/detail/2014/03/id/1225556.shtml, last visit 12/17/19).

  3. Information recorded in the Work Report of the CCDI delivered at the CCP’s 19th Congress held in 2017. The full report is available at https://news.qq.com/a/20171029/022008.htm (last visit, 12/17/19).

  4. Besides “Open Law”, another most popular source of court cases is the “China Judgements Online”, the official publication website of the Chinese judiciary. There is little difference between the two in terms of case inclusion, as “Open Law” often takes cases directly from the “China Judgements Online”. In this project, we turned to “Open Law” because of its (more) user-friendly features, including easy access, search and downloading functions.

  5. As shown in Tables below, a decent proportion of offenders in our sample received no criminal punishment, which is a valid option per the CL (Article 37) when the circumstances of a case are trivial.

  6. Jail (juyi in Chinese) is reserved for short-term incarceration (no more than 6 months or one year with multiple crimes) by Chinese law.

  7. Specifically, cities that belong to first-tier cities in China are labeled ‘economically developed’, and others ‘developing and less developed’. More information is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_city_tier_system.

  8. A few studies suggested a curvilinear relationship between official ranks and legal punishment (Gong et al., 2019; Zhu, 2015), as mid-tier officials were able to use their clout locally to gain favor. Data in Table 5 seems to suggest a rather linear relationship: for both embezzlement and bribe-taking, one’s likelihood of being incarcerated and the incarceration length increased with the increase of one’s rank in general. Two possible answers might help explain the linear results here: one is the likely effect of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign against tigers, and the other is the more centralized campaigns which dealt with potential local protectionism (Deng, 2018; Zhu, 2015). Both could potentially prevent the leverages by mid-tier officials who might have benefited previously.

  9. We’d like to thank the anonymous reviewer for raising this important point.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Tulane University, 220 Newcomb Hall, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    Xin Jiang

  2. Department of Public Administration, Hainan Academy of Governance, Hainan, China

    Shan Cui & Jianhong Liu

  3. Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa, 700 North Greenwood Avenue, Main Hall, 2223, Tulsa, OK, 74114, USA

    Bin Liang

  4. School of Law, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China

    Honglan Shuai

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Jiang, X., Cui, S., Liang, B. et al. Tigers vs. flies: impact of official ranks on judicial trials in PRC’s anti-corruption campaign. Crime Law Soc Change 80, 51–78 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10072-9

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