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Individuals who take advantage of global networks to flee abroad with allegedly corrupt proceeds comprise an important yet understudied group of corruption suspects. We characterize them as "globalized corruption fugitives" and, using the case of China, investigate how they take advantage of international loopholes. Under President Xi Jinping, China actively began to pursue such suspects. Our analysis of their backgrounds and how they evade repatriation to China is based mainly on a list of China's 100 wanted fugitives issued through Interpol Red Notices, supplemented with interviews and documentary data. We find that (1) unexpectedly, government officials did not comprise the majority in the sample; rather, state-owned companies and financial institutions, especially those based in coastal regions, seem to breed fugitive corruption suspects; (2) a tremendous amount of capital has been laundered; (3) Western countries are the most popular destinations of these fugitives, due in part to the protection against repatriation of these countries' legal systems; and (4) Hong Kong serves as a distinct transit point for fugitives from the PRC's justice system. This research highlights the transnational dimension of such corruption cases. (China J/GIGA)

Corruption in the Chinese real estate (RE) industry is a very serious and prevalent issue. This article focuses on variations in Chinese RE corruption. It argues that due to an expansion of the official players at each step in the RE development process, corruption is an unintended consequence of the reform to regulate the industry. Despite the empowerment of local governments and bureaucracies, corruption has emerged in these entities, spreading from local people's governments to functional units, creating a chain of corrupt practices which includes groups of officials and large sums of money. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

This article analyzes how and why buying and selling offices (BSO) has re-emerged in China since the 1990s, from the perspective of demand and supply in a case study. The major causes are the weaknesses of the Chinese cadre management systems—concentration of power over personnel issues and the difficulties of monitoring top administrators.

Extant literature has shown the importance of routinized leadership succession for authoritarian resilience. However, the factors leading to orderly power transitions in autocracies are unclear. This article argues that an orderly succession requires relatively peaceful exit of the incumbent. Through a comparison of the power transition trajectories of the post-Stalin USSR and China in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, this article proposes three conditions that facilitate the voluntary retirement of dictators, including their strong political will to institutionalize successions, adequate capacity to initiate the plan, and reliable retirement packages. Meeting all three conditions, leadership succession in China has resulted in the emergence of the "modern regency" in which the elder leaders can retire relatively voluntarily and continuously influence the politics of a regime after their retirement, especially by proactively supervising future leadership successions. In contrast, without meeting the initial requirements for a dictator's exit, the case of leadership succession in the USSR is characterized as parallel succession, which includes neither a credible plan on routinization of elite politics nor simultaneous coexistence of the elder leaders and the younger cohort as in the case of China. Moreover, during similar regime crises in the late 1980s, the arrangement of the modern regency helped prolong the authoritarian regime in China, while the USSR collapsed without this safeguard.

How do people address information deficiency caused by rigid control of information in authoritarian regimes? We argue that there exists an internally oriented information compensation approach through which people can glean extra information from official messages domestically. This approach does not violate state regulations directly and allows people to retrieve information not explicitly publicized by the government. We delineate the circumstances of internally oriented information compensation using the case of China. We conduct trend and text analysis on the data of millions of individual-level actions of Chinese Internet search engines and social media users during a large anticorruption campaign that conspicuously claimed to crack down on influential corrupt leaders without naming who exactly. We show that some Chinese netizens were able to identify the unnamed high-ranking officials targeted by the campaign based on negative official reports about their family members. Some of the netizens even correctly predicted the downfall of the officials months before the government's announcements. As the existing literature is increasingly concerned about the threat of digital authoritarianism on throttling the free flow of information, our findings indicate that some authoritarian citizens, instead of passively accepting the government's information control, acquired their own arts of information self-salvation. This, though not directly challenging the government, constitutes an everyday politics under digital authoritarianism.

Governments at times combat corruption intensively in an attempt to (re)gain political trust. While corruption crackdowns may demonstrate government resolve to fight corruption, the high-profile corruption uncovered may also shock the public. Therefore, how effective can anticorruption policies help boost political trust? We argue that anticorruption policies influence political trust through two channels: direct experience, that is, interactions with governmental bodies, and the media, that is, second-hand information culled from reporting on anticorruption. Differentiating between these two channels illustrates that anticorruption policies may have distinct effects on political trust for different social groups. We contextualize our theoretical framework with the latest anticorruption drive in China, combining longitudinal data from a national survey and field interviews and using difference-in-differences (DID) models. Our findings support our predictions. For state-system insiders (e.g., civil servants), increase of political trust is less pronounced than for outsiders because the former directly experience radical implementation processes and ineffective anticorruption outcomes. Similarly, political trust increases at a lower rate for groups with higher levels of education and greater access to information outside governmental propaganda than for their less-informed counterparts. Intensive anticorruption efforts are therefore more likely to increase political trust for the grassroots than for elites in China.