Despite all the noise and fury directed at corruption by the public and the media in Mainland China, as well as the Chinese government’s periodic campaigns against corruption and the leadership’s repeated warnings that corruption is a matter of life and death, corruption in Mainland China does not seem to retreat, and may even be worse. Though it has been ceaselessly fighting a war against corruption for the past three decades, the Chinese government has made little, if any, progress.In order to discover whether the problem of Mainland China’s corruption can be more successfully addressed, the thesis first attempts to discover how the nations of Singapore and Hong Kong, both largely composed of Chinese descendents and Chinese culture, diminished corruption and remained relatively clean for decades. By keeping the culture variable constant across the three countries, this thesis can test whether culture explains Mainland China’s corruption problem, as well as compare the institutional factor in the anticorruption efforts in the three countries. A review of the anti-corruption efforts of these countries reveals that huge systemic corruption is not rooted in Chinese culture, though it has played a varying role in Chinese culture and history. This point leads to the major thesis question:if it is not the cultural factor that explains the difficulty of controlling corruption in Mainland China, then attention turns to institutional factors. What is wrong within Mainland China’s institutional mechanisms that leads to chronic and abominable corruption? Though they were marked by Chinese culture and rampant corruption during the colonial period, both Singapore and Hong Kong transformed from extremely corrupt countries to become some of the world’s least corrupt countries. With regard to institutional factors explaining persistent corruption in Mainland China, findings of this thesis reveal that dilemmas (-dual leadership and overlapping jurisdictions-) embedded in the institutional design of the disciplinary inspection system, and corruption in anticorruption agencies, may explain why these anti-corruption agencies cannot control corruption in the public administrative sector in Mainland China. In contrast, the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) in Singapore and the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in Hong Kong play an essential role in keeping those governments clean. Fundamentally, the difference between Mainland China and Singapore/Hong Kong is the anti-corruption effort’s lack of institutional autonomy and independence from political elements in Mainland China, whereas both Singapore and Hong Kong have effective anticorruption agencies within a politically insulated institutional structure that gives them enormous independence and powers as well as internal and external checks and balances. |