Recent Anti-corruption Legal Reforms in China

Corruption is one of the thorny issues in any modern society, especially in China. The new leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by President Xi Jinping has robustly initiated an anti-corruption campaign as soon as he took over as the party chief in the end of 2012. Several legal reforms aiming at fighting harder against corruption crimes drew attention from home and abroad, including foreign investors. These reforms include the enactment of the National Supervision Law in 2018, the introduction of “trial in absentia” in the 2018 Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) amendment, and the establishment of a special proceeding of confiscation of illegal gains in the 2012 CPL amendment. Another undergoing reform is on the corporate compliance non-prosecution. China used to adopt a dual punishment approach upon unit crimes, which means imposing punishments on individual offenders, usually the directly responsible persons, and on the enterprises separately. However, the traditional sanction against enterprises tends to cause secondary harms to the society. For example, when a corporate is bankrupted, thousands of innocent people will be unemployed. Therefore, non-prosecution might be a more effective way of ensuring corporate compliance as well as minimalizing the harm mentioned above. This paper explores the anti-corruption mechanisms Chinese government has created or improved over the past decade and attempts to provide a whole picture of China’s anti-corruption law.