Over the past thirty years, the anti-corruption agenda has been integrated into dominant discourses of development, good governance, and democracy, reshaping political practices and knowledge production. This involved redefining concepts, operationalizing measures, and legitimizing policies. While academics have renewed focus on corruption, emphasizing global convergences and institutional designs, limited attention is given to how anti-corruption expertise is constituted and mobilized. Gaps remain in understanding the approaches shaping anti-corruption knowledge and how inequalities in knowledge production influence public policy. Recognizing its embeddedness requires examining historical roots, key actors, methods, and mobilization channels. This chapter uncovers the historical origins of anti-corruption conceptions, identifies experts by epistemological and methodological approaches, and interprets their positions. The study identifies three dominant poles of power: American academics, quantitative economists, and media-exposed practitioners. These poles reflect disparities in professional stability, autonomy, and proximity to international financial institutions. Using a historic, reflexive, and relational perspective, the investigation maps the social forces and structures shaping the field, offering insights into the production and mobilization of anti-corruption knowledge.

How has the CPC maintained its organizational strength over time, especially during the period of economic reform? This chapter argues that the several important measures taken since the 1990s have reinforced the party as a strong organization. The personnel management reform since the 1990s has standardized the elite recruitment and provided a relatively fair channel of social mobility within the regime. The CPC has monopolized both the allocation of critical economic resources and appointments of key political, economic, and other societal offices through the Nomenklatura system, so that the party can distribute spoils of China’s economic growths to its key members and supporters in exchange of their loyalty. Since the beginning of Xi’s rule in 2012, the party has expanded the anticorruption and disciplinary body, committed more resources to campaigns of ideological indoctrination, increased the party’s involvement in daily policymaking and the private sector, and diversified channels of elite recruitment. These measures appear to have reinforced the party’s organizational capacity, but their long-term effects are yet to be assessed.

Following a socially embedded approach to the study of corruption, this chapter shows how corruption, its meaning, and the battle against it are deeply local and temporal. Relying primarily on original party documents and news reports, this chapter traces the chronological order of anti-corruption practices between 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established, and 2020 to illustrate how the meanings of corruption, types of misbehavior to address, and the type of selected punishment were all articulated temporally.

This concluding chapter outlines the contours of the Party-state and develops a conceptual framework to explain its distinctive mode of governance. At its core is a dual normative system: a legal system grounded in popular sovereignty is overseen and constrained by a power-based normative system designed to uphold the absolute authority of the Party Center—an organizing principle essential to maintaining the structural integrity of the Party-state. The chapter argues that the governance logic of the Party-state is best captured by the theory of Normalized Political Prerogative (NPP). According to this theory, governance unfolds through a three-step process: operationalization, normalization, and regulation. Together, these constitute the formal institutional foundation of Party-state rule. The NPP framework elucidates the systemic proliferation of corruption as an inherent byproduct of this mode of governance, the role of the Party’s disciplinary apparatus as a self-correcting mechanism to mitigate its adverse effects, and the evolving dynamics between institutions and leadership that shape politicking and power struggles within the Politburo.

Unlike anticorruption institutions elsewhere, China’s anticorruption practices follow a self-regulatory model: it is regulated by the very institution that is targeted by anticorruption. Compared with its role in judicial affairs, the Party’s involvement in anticorruption investigation is much more forefront, direct, and prominent. In this chapter, I track the origin and institutional evolution of the Party’s disciplinary system during 1927-2012. I point out that the Party’s institutional design is founded on the cardinal principle to preserve the unified (absolute) command of the Party Center. Thereby, how to reconcile between the imperative to uphold this principle and the need to provide a measure of autonomy for disciplinary institutions to avoid capture has been the main theme of the disciplinary institution-building process. The introduction of a tiered interlocking disciplinary decision-making structure, the segmented investigation process, and the “dual-leadership” model are the direct outcomes of the Party’s efforts to balance the conflicting needs mentioned above. These arrangements had fueled the rise of the CCDI but also brought several problems and challenges, including legal deficiency, jurisdictional frictions, resource shortage, incentive issues, and abuse, which had set the stage for Xi Jinping’s unprecedented anti-corruption campaign and disciplinary reform upon his taking power in 2012.

In this chapter, I survey major historical cases to examine different paradigms under which a disciplinary action against a Politburo member could be launched and how these paradigms were observed, abandoned, or changed over time. I find two prominent paradigms. One is a highly ideologized model developed during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign in 1941-1942. This model enables the winning party to conduct a purge of its adversaries with broad scope and impact, while reinforcing Party unity. It also has several disadvantages, including heightened social disruption, excessive purging, and the exposure of divisions in the Party leadership. The other is the de-ideologized corruption model. The paradigm shift was spurred by the political crisis of 1989, attributed at least in part to the exposure of an ideological split at the Party Center. Another reason for the shift was the introduction of the age-limit norm, which provided an alternative mechanism to facilitate peaceful exits of Politburo members in a regular and predictable manner. Under Xi Jinping's rule, the utility of the corruption model has been maximized. At the same time, the resulting power shakeup led to widespread political resentment, which, in turn, triggered the politicization of the corruption model.

This chapter addresses how the pathways of legal strategy can be applied in practice. The first part of this chapter presents three case studies that show how firms can respond to common legal challenges. The mandate to stop sexual harassment, the protection of intellectual property rights, and the prohibitions related to anti-corruption are all used as examples of how each pathway can be applied with varying levels of effectiveness. The second part of the chapter explores how a firm can elevate its implementation of legal knowledge from one pathway to another. This part shows how companies can evolve their legal practices from avoidance to conformance, conformance to prevention, prevention to value, and value to transformation. Although not every legal issue is transformative, understanding how the pathways work in practice can help firms deploy their legal knowledge as effectively as possible.

This chapter discusses corruption in Brazil. I provide a comprehensive overview of relevant facts, with a focus on the economy and the distribution of economic resources. This understanding will be crucial in examining the role of corruption in the political landscape of Brazilian society, which is marked by pronounced inequality. Brazil shares similarities and differences with Russia. In both countries, there is a close, often corrupt relationship between political power and state-controlled enterprises. In contrast to Brazil, the anti-corruption movement in Russia has not only failed to seriously challenge the government, but also has been confronted by brutal repression. Unlike in Russia, Brazil’s judiciary has been highly proactive. Moreover, the Brazilian government participated actively to the anti-corruption global regime, while Russia mostly pays lip service to it.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. A focus on the social construction of corruption leads to the two main conclusions. First, corruption is a tool of government, because it offers reasons for elites to remain cohesive. These incentives may be in the form of both benefits and punishments. To the first type belong the enticements of corruption, and they are reinforced whenever the ruler has the possibility to assign at will the label “corrupt” and the ensuing punishments. This helps rulers solve a problem of control, which is a prerequisite for political order and a vital necessity of any political system. However, corruption as a tool of government has fundamental flaws. The second broad conclusion is that anti-corruption is a tool of politics, because it can be used to pursue a political agenda. Additionally, corruption is a tool of politics which is available more widely, because it is a powerful “valence issue,” that is, one of those issues on which most people agree, either negatively (as for corruption) or positively (as it would be, e.g., for “competence”). However, as a tool of politics anti-corruption has many shortcomings.

Anti-corruption efforts struggle against the perverse aptness of corruption in satisfying that prerequisite of government which is control. Anti-corruption efforts also fall victim to the function it serves as a tool of politics. From this perspective, this chapter derives a pessimistic view on the prospects of anti-corruption efforts that are narrowly defined, on which I present some concluding considerations. They vouch for a broader approach to the question of corruption, and they touch upon the idea of modernity and one of its key ingredients: the possibility of human agency.

Separation of powers or, more exactly, the rule of law, due process or, in Europe, the right to a fair trial influence the institutional setting of antitrust or regulatory authorities and law enforcement. An increased role given to specific regulation or antitrust in order to tackle some fundamental issues posed by the concentration of economic-political power does not go without independent and impartial decision-making from an institutional and procedural, a personal or a financial and lobbying perspective.