The Logic of Central Inspection in China’s Anticorruption Campaign

Abstract

Policymakers’ attention is a scarce resource. While what information that comes to receive this attention can critically influence policy agenda and ultimately the actions the government take, how attention allocation itself comes to be shaped by information is still open to question. The answer to this question is especially obscure for authoritarian regimes with opaque politics. This research attempts to explore the logic of attention allocation in authoritarian regimes in the context of the central inspection in the recent anticorruption campaign in China. First formed in 2003, the central inspection groups (zhongyang xunshizu) have been revived under Xi Jinping. These groups are sent from the top by the Central Discipline Inspection Committee (CDIC), the primary anticorruption agency lead by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), down to various localities and units, including provinces, state institutions, state-owned enterprises, and so on, to supervise their work and uncover violations. During the inspection, these groups can call meetings, interview people, and review documents for investigation purposes. The information and opinions that the groups report directly to the CDIC plays an important role in the party leaders’ decisions on the fate of the inspected officials and units. Given that the inspection groups specialize in corruption and other organizational irregularities, how the targets were selected for inspection may offer important insights into how authoritarians handle information in an area where the tendency to conceal and the challenge of effective oversight is particularly pronounced. A survival analysis of the 12 rounds of central inspection during the CCP’s 18th Party Committee from 2012 to 2017 suggests that the central inspection groups do not select their targets using information in a manner consistent with the oversight literature. Instead, it has a strong “warning shot” nature, which is not about detecting corruption alone but to use oversight institutions to uncover bureaucratic drift and shape behaviors of those beyond the direct targets of investigation.