Miscarriages of Justice in Corruption Cases in China: An Achilles’ Heel in Anticorruption?

Description

The anticorruption campaign of “hunting the tigers and sweeping the flies” at the auspices of President Xi Jinping since his ascension to power in 2012 has garnered tremendous public support in China. Public opinion and academic research have so far largely centered on how to make anticorruption more effective and less selective so as to round up more “tigers and flies”. Little attention has been paid to the possibility of aiming at the wrong targets, i.e. wrongfully charging, prosecuting and convicting an innocent official in the pursuit of anticorruption. This gap is surprising, given the unique political and legal systems established under the CCP ruling since 1980 and the history of miscarriages of justice during successive political purges prior to 1980. This study aims to fill the gap by investigating miscarriages of justice in anticorruption in China since 1980. Based on a review of the institutional flaws contributing to corruption and ineffective anticorruption in the literature, this study draws on the institutional theory to identify institutional factors for wrongful corruption convictions: the possible abuse of party leadership in anticorruption, the prevailing culture of rule of man regardless of the political slogan of “ruling the country by law”, the long tradition of violation of human rights and presumption of guilty in the criminal justice system, and the overarching application of the performance evaluation system in the bureaucracy. It plans to achieve three objectives: a) to examine the characteristics of such cases, and identify the direct contributing factors and underlying political factors for the wrongful convictions, drawing on the literature on wrongful convictions of violent offenders; b) to analyze the channels for the exoneration of wronged officials; and c) to explore the mechanisms for the prevention of miscarriages of justice in anticorruption. It is based on a triangulation of research methods: an aggregated case study of 51 ascertained wrongful corruption cases and field research including observations of court hearings in four cities in China and in-depth interviews with legal professionals and victims of wrongful corruption convictions. The implications of the proposed study are two-fold: 1) it extends the literature on wrongful convictions to examine a different group of nonviolent offenders and explores the extent to which findings from the two groups converge, and 2) it contributes to anticorruption in China by calling our attention to the possibility of miscarriages of justice and remedies for such grave errors of justice.