Recent high-profile corruption cases in China, such as Shanghai housing bureau executive Yin Guoyuan and Beijing district chief Zhou Lianglo’s questionable property deals, reports the April 19th article “Not the Best Way to Clean Up” in The Economist, have the Communist Party talking loudly about clean-up. But for all the noise, debate and consideration of other models for dealing with corruption appear to be the order in China, looking to Hong Kong and Singapore’s “especially appealing” “authoritarian” models for clean government. Earlier talk about setting up a Corruption Prevention Bureau is met with skepticism by those like Tsinghua University professor (and heavily-cited critic) Ren Jianming, who point out that the overlap with the Party’s fickle (as President Hu’s tenure has seen so far) anticorruption agency, the Central Disciplinary Inspection Commission, as well as the probable accountability structure for the proposed agency indicates only more of the same half-hearted investigative effort bogged down by ineffective protocol, such as requiring commissions to inform the very leaders they intend to investigate, despite recent “reshufflings.”
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