Will the Communist Party of China Be Able to Win the Anticorruption Battle?

Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012, the CPC has made great efforts to implement Xi Jinping's blueprint for achieving the “China Dream”. The on-going anticorruption campaign is part of the road map towards the “China Dream”. There has been impressive progress in fighting corruption, but the CPC recognizes that the anticorruption campaign faces a huge challenge and is at a crucial stage. The anticorruption campaign is a life-and-death battle that the CPC cannot afford to lose. The critical question is: How can the CPC win the battle in the current Chinese political system? The intention of this paper is not to offer specific measures, but to discuss policy implications by elucidating why some existing anticorruption measures do not work through examining the relationship between corruption and Chinese market economy and the political system. The basic assumption of this paper is that corruption is universal, but the characteristics of China’s corruption are different from other nations due to the nature of the Chinese economic, political and cultural systems. The key to anticorruption is to find and deal with the real causes of China’s corruption in order to make effective anticorruption measures. There are two opposite perspectives concerning the causes of corruption: While one suggests that the primary source of corruption is the political system, the other contends that corruption has nothing to do with the socialist political system. This paper attempts to argue that either denying or overemphasizing the roles of the current political system in spreading corruption is one-sided