The Causes and Countermeasures of Corruption in China

Abstract

Based on the Transparency International’s rank, China have had serious corruption issue so far (Lawrence & Weber, 2017). Since the reform and opening-up policy has been carried out in 1978, corruption has rapidly worsened in China, although the Chinese economy has been performing well (Wederman, 2004). Some scholars argued that the corruption may distort the allocation of resources, but unlike other countries, China’s economic growth was not affected significantly by corruption because of high level of public trust (Li & Wu, 2007). However, corruption may result in a serious regional income inequality and has significant negative consequences of increasing public resentment and social unrest causing more harm to economy (Wu & Zhu, 2011). As a result, the Chinese government often aggressively punishes the corruption actions by law (Lawrence & Weber, 2017).

There are currently few researches to focus on corruption in China because of sensitive nature of corruption and lack of effective methodologies limited to surveys and case studies (Guo, 2008). In this paper, corruption only refers to bribery, a common form and consequence of abuse of public authority for personal gains (Wederman, 2004). By looking at some literatures, this short paper first elaborated on several reasons why corruption in China has been so serious, then come up with a constructive framework coping with corruption.