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By Root 473 0

goods and services, it became much easier and less risky for corrupt officials to hoard and consume their spoils. Had the post-Mao regime replaced the high-cost and violent form of monitoring by mass terror and by political campaigns with monitoring by the media and civic groups, the state would have acquired a more effective tool to control corruption by its agents. Despite its market-friendly economic policies, however, the CCP has focused its repressive energy on the liberal intelligentsia and the media, curbing the media’s role of policing the behavior of government agents. Similarly, fearful of the political challenge posed by the emerging civil society forces, the government has limited the growth and political influence of civic groups. Indeed, a study of China’s civic groups in the early 1990s shows that few of them could be classified as public interest groups.41 And in combating corruption, the role of the civil society is practically nonexistent.

Within the regime’s bureaucratic hierarchy, the mechanisms of monitoring government officials are faulty and ineffective. For example, the most important internal anticorruption body of the CCP is the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), which has a vertical organizational structure that parallels the party organization. But this agency is not independent, and the post of the secretary of the CDIC is subordinate to the party secretary, who is the yibashou. In many cases, other local officials also outrank the party official in charge of the CDIC. This institutional arrangement greatly undercuts the effectiveness of the CDIC. If monitoring and policing hundreds of thousands of local officials is an impossible task for the central authorities, it also appears that Beijing does not have a working institutional mechanism to monitor frontline provincial cadres. The CCP’s CDIC and the COD rely only on ad hoc inspection teams dispatched to the provinces to evaluate the performance and conduct of provincial-level officials.

This practice, begun in 1996, has produced dubious results because these inspection teams are made up of retired senior leaders who have little local knowledge and operate in isolation. Their movements and information sources can be easily controlled by the same provincial leaders they are supposed to evaluate. Because it takes four to five months for a team to complete its inspection in one province, only a small number of provinces can be inspected each year. In 2003, only five inspection teams were sent to ten provinces.42 The head of one inspection team publicly complained that it was common practice for provincial leaders to feed the inspection teams with false information.43 This makes it almost impossible for these central inspection teams to uncover corruption by provincial officials. Of the sixteen to seventeen provincial leaders (about 2 percent of the frontline provincial officials) who were punished each year for corruption, few were exposed by the inspection teams.44

Even CCP insiders openly admit that the monitoring system functions poorly. A survey of party officials conducted by the CCP’s provincial organization department in Shanxi province in 1999 reported that only about 10 percent of the respondents thought the effects of monitoring leaders were “good and quite good”; 64 percent thought they were “so-so”; and 23 percent said they were “poor.”45 A similar survey in Sichuan in 1999 found that 42 percent identified “loose supervision and monitoring” as the most important cause of local corruption.46 For state agents, who enjoy the advantages of information asymmetry, ineffective monitoring simply removes another deterrent against the abuse of power and corruption. As indicated by the results of the government audits of various bureaucracies, the misuse of public resources was pervasive among party and government officials. In 2003, for example, the National Audit Administration audited 36,000 cadres and discovered that 67 billion yuan were misused.47 In Hubei province alone, an audit of 1,151 officials in 2003 found that they