In one of the most controversial but overshadowedoutcomes of its March 2018 meeting, China's National People's Congress (NPC) approved a constitutional amendment creating a super-sized anti-corruption body called the National Supervision Commission and adopted a Supervision Law to govern its operations. A massive institutional restructuring plan subsequently issued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) makes clear the Commission will be co-located with — and integrate its anti-corruption functions with — the CCP's own powerful anti-graft body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).
Chinese authorities intended the Supervision Law to place China's ongoing anti-corruption campaign under legal procedures, rather than continuing to prosecute it primarily through the CCDI's internal — and extralegal — channels. But the Law fails to subject anti-corruption work to the due process requirements of China's criminal justice and administrative law systems. Instead, its stipulations appear to be enforceable only by the state supervisors it purports to regulate and by the CCDI. This arrangement makes the National Supervision Commission ultimately accountable only to the CCP, threatening both to undermine efforts to establish law-based governance and to complicate China's global anti-corruption campaign.
China's leaders have long recognized corruption as the greatest threat to the CCP's legitimacy and sustainability. After taking office as CCP general secretary in November 2012, Xi Jinping vowed to institutionalize the CCP's ongoing anti-corruption efforts and called for strengthened laws to punish and prevent corruption. After five years of an anti-corruption campaign that investigated more than 2.7 million officials, punished more than 1.5 million, and criminally tried 58,000, Xi pressed for reform of the supervision system to more effectively constrain the power of public servants “in a cage of regulations” under CCP leadership.
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