The writer,an expert on Chinese civil society, is currently working on a project to promote open government information in China.
As China’s anticorruption campaign enters into its fourth year, the importance of inspection teams in catching corrupt officials has become obvious.
In the past few years, more than half of the corruption cases investigated by the Communist Party’s internal watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), have been discovered through inspections, the commission announced last month. Central government corruption inspection teams have in recent years more than doubled their staff, while 100 new inspection teams have been created at the provincial level and nearly 900 new staff added to their ranks.
How do inspection teams work? According to state media reports, when they arrive at a party or government unit, inspection teams typically publicize their contact information and install a complaint box, to encourage individuals with information on corruption and disciplinary violations in the unit to report it through letters, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings. Inspection teams may also conduct personal interviews with current and former staff members, especially all the leading cadres of the unit. In addition, they may review the unit’s files, audit its accounts, sit in on its meetings, and issue questionnaires among its staff. If necessary, they can also bring in other agencies with expertise in specialized areas to assist with the inspection.
Contrary to common perception, inspection teams are not sent by the party’s discipline inspection commissions. Instead, they are authorized by higher levels of party organization to inspect party and government units at a lower level. For instance, central government inspection teams dispatched to the provinces represent the party’s Central Committee, not just the CCDI. Their members normally include cadres from other Central Committee departments in addition to the CCDI, such as the Organization Department.
As representatives of superior party organizations, one would expect inspection teams to be feared and respected by the units receiving them. Most inspections do appear to go smoothly. Inspectors hardly ever go home emptyhanded. However, that doesn’t mean that the inspectors’ job is always easy. Guilty parties with things to hide often try desperately to hinder their work.
For example, according to a report by China’s Economic Observer, during the central government inspection team’s visit to Henan province in April 2014, local officials from various prefectures, counties and townships in the province staked out the hotel where the inspectors stayed, in order to prevent people from their localities from meeting the inspectors.
One of the high-profile tigers that have been brought down through inspection, the former police chief of Tianjin, Wu Changshun, tried to intimidate the inspection team, according to a report last year by a magazine connected to the CCDI. The magazine reported that Wu, presumably in an effort to suggest that he had a powerful backer, told the inspectors that a top leader had asked him to pass on a book to the head of the team. It turned out that Wu was just bluffing, but he was so feared by informants that many of them did not dare meet with the inspection team. Inspectors had to arrange to meet informants secretly in Beijing, the report said.
Some units under inspection have come up with more imaginative ways to make the inspectors’ life difficult. An inspector in Heilongjiang province named Wang Weixu told the Heilongjiang Daily that some units provided inspection teams with meals that were either too salty or too spicy to eat. Other units operated electric saws or arranged painting jobs near the inspectors’ offices, making it impossible for the inspectors to work there.
After describing various hardships which inspectors have endured in the line of duty, Mr. Wang concluded that they were in the business of “offending people.” Interestingly, while many readers commented on a Sina.com reposting of Mr. Wang’s story, only a small number expressed sympathy for inspectors. Most readers questioned why the anticorruption campaign had not been more open to public participation:
“If inspection is a job of offending people, why not give the job to the people to do?”
“The best inspectors are the people.”
“Without mobilizing the public, organizing the public and relying wholeheartedly on the public, anticorruption is like water without a source and a tree without roots. One cannot be optimistic about its ultimate result.”
“Making officials’ personal assets public, accepting supervision by the public. That would be the best form of inspection.”
The comments reflect an important aspect of China’s anticorruption campaign: Despite its impressive record in striking down tigers and flies, it has been conducted as internal affairs by the party, in the sense that the general public has not been allowed any significant part in it. Yes, anybody can report corruption to the party’s discipline inspection commissions at central and local levels, but this is nothing new. This avenue has long since been available to the public, but obviously its effect in stemming corruption had been rather limited.
One case is particularly illuminating. Wu Sha, former police chief of Guangzhou municipality, was formally placed under investigation in November 2015, after the provincial inspection team found evidence of his corruption. Beginning in 2012, a Guangzhou lawyer filed multiple freedom of information requests to several Guangzhou government agencies, asking them to disclose information on Wu Sha’s income, assets and property owned by Wu and his family members, according to Weibo postings by the lawyer, Cui Lizhong.
All the requests were rejected, with authorities responding to Cui that the requested internal information was exempt from official disclosure requirements. The lawyer then took the agencies to court but lost all the cases as well as the appeals. In 2013 and 2014, the lawyer contacted the CCDI, the Guangdong provincial Discipline Inspection Commission and the provincial party’s Politics and Law Committee to accuse Wu Sha of abuse of power. Before the inspection team’s arrival, none of the lawyer’s actions appeared to have affected Wu Sha in any way.
So far, the party has resisted calls to disclose officials’ assets to enable public supervision. It has not allowed media to perform a watchdog function either, largely limiting the media’s role to beating up the carcasses of dead tigers instead of exposing live tigers, as one shrewd Chinese commentator put it in 2014.
The routine operations of discipline inspection commissions have proved to be inadequate. Inspection has demonstrated its value in fighting corruption, but only because the leadership has chosen to give it teeth. It has worked because the leadership wants it to work this time. This is why critics continue to argue that Xi Jinping’s anticorruption effort is just a political campaign, not an institutionalized arrangement. And this is why, regardless of its short-term achievements, many still doubt the campaign will effectively contain corruption in the long term. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/02/29/dont-expect-chinas-corruption-inspectors-to-work-miracles/
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