China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [90]
Low probability ofpunishment
Analysis of the data on corruption provided by the CDIC suggests that in the 1990s, the probability of criminal penalties against corrupt officials was extremely low and, for all practical purposes, almost negligible. The commission’s work report given in 1997 revealed the extent to which corrupt officials were lightly punished by the criminal justice system. 55 According to the report, the commission closed investigations on an average of 141,000 alleged corruption cases every ycar, but the majority of the CCP members (about 82 percent) found to have committed corrupt acts received no more than a symbolic reprimand carrying no substantive administrative or financial penalties. Only a small number of corrupt CCP members—18 percent of those punished—were expelled from the CCP in the six-year period covered by the report (1992-1997). The expulsion rate had been steadily declining since the early 1980s. According to Yan Sun’s research, the rate was 23.4 percent during 1982-1986 and 21 percent during 1987-1992.56 The likelihood of criminal prosecution is low. The overall prosecution rate is extremely low—just 5.6 percent of all the CCP members found guilty of corruption (averaging about eight thousand a year in the late 1990s) were subject to prosecution. In 2004, the prosecution rate fell to 2.9 percent when only 4,915 out of 170,850 party officials and members disciplined were transferred to judicial authorities for prosecution. Official figures show that China prosecuted, on average, 95,000 individuals for bribery, embezzlement, and illegal use of public funds in the same period.57 This suggests that only one in ten individuals prosecuted on corruption charges was a member of the CCP.
Another set of numbers, released by the COD, also shows the lenient treatment corrupt officials received at the hands of Chinese authorities. Overall, only 6.6 percent of all officials found guilty of corruption received sentences, a rate indicative of the extremely low risk of participation in corrupt activities by Chinese officials, even though higher-level officials face modestly higher risks of criminal penalties (Table 4.4). The lenient treatment of corrupt officials remained unchanged despite the advent of a new leadership in late 2002, which vowed to take tougher measures against official corruption. From December 2002 to November 2003, the CCP’s own anticorruption agency concluded 172,571 corruption cases and punished 174,580 party officials and members, including 6,043 county-level, 411 bureau-level, and 21 provincial-level cadres. But of the more than 170,000 cadres punished by the CCP, only 8,691 (5 percent) were expelled from the party and transferred to judicial authorities for prosecution. Among those criminally prosecuted were 418 cadres with county-level or higher rankings—6.4 percent of all the similarly ranked officials punished in the period.58
New Exit Options
The availability of new exit options is a key variable in state agents’ calculations regarding self-dealing. Everything else being equal, the availability of such options may likely reduce the time-horizon of agents, increase their discount rates on future income streams, and motivate them to intensify the level of predation. Evidence from China supports this hypothesis. Whereas the closed system in Maoist China left few exit options available for state agents, the post-Mao economic opening has multiplied exit options for them. In the Chinese case, moreover, there are two institutional features of the cadre management system that influence the time-horizon of government officials. The first is the mandatory retirement of almost all government officials (except ministers and provincial governors) at the age of sixty. Originally implemented