This chapter begins by highlighting that public anger over corruption can have punishing political effects, making curbing it a critical issue for powerholders everywhere. I note that existing scholarship on corruption control focuses heavily on democracies and does not explain under what conditions authoritarian regimes combat and reduce corruption. I discuss the conventional wisdom about how autocrats do not have incentives to curb corruption and how my book challenges this view by showing a surprising number of meaningful anti-corruption efforts by authoritarian regimes. I lay out my argument for when and why authoritarian regimes are most likely to curb corruption, describe this book’s main cases in China, South Korea, and Taiwan, and introduce my novel scoring system for anti-corruption efforts. I then discuss the various theoretical implications of my argument for the broader study of authoritarian politics and governance. Finally, I give a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book to come.

The concluding chapter reviews my findings and considers the contributions this book makes to the study of authoritarian politics and the study of East Asian politics. I also discuss the global trend of rising public demand for clean government and its implications in light of my study’s findings.

Chapter 7 widens the lens of analysis to consider anti-corruption efforts in a diverse set of authoritarian regimes: Cuba, Malaysia, Rwanda, Singapore, and Vietnam. These short case studies are analytically useful as “plausibility probes” to assess the applicability of my theory beyond just the main East Asian cases. They also serve as test cases for alternative explanations, such as that quasi-democratic institutions or collective leadership will help authoritarian regimes to curb corruption. Most, though not all, of the anti-corruption efforts in these authoritarian regimes match my theoretical expectations based on whether autocrats had motivation, discretionary power, and state capacity. I also find further evidence against alternative hypotheses. This chapter is primarily based on secondary-source research.

Chapter 5 gives an overview of the Chinese Communist Party’s many campaigns against corruption throughout its history up to 1990. As with Taiwan and South Korea in previous chapters, authoritarian anti-corruption success in China has depended on a strongly motivated leadership with discretionary power driving reforms and a capable party-state implementing them. This combination of factors allowed Chairman Mao’s Three Antis–Five Antis Campaign (1951–53) to curb corruption and help the new communist regime penetrate and reform China’s complex urban areas. However, the disastrous failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) triggered a rise in bribe-taking and embezzlement, especially among rural cadres, and later campaigns under Mao aimed at controlling corruption ended in failure. After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping prioritized liberalizing economic reforms and proved unwilling to jeopardize these reforms by cracking down on the corruption that had come with them. The party leadership conducted a large-scale purge of allegedly corrupt officials to assuage public discontent after the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, but it ultimately had little effect.

Chapter 3 analyzes how the Kuomintang (KMT) significantly reformed itself, including by bringing corruption under control, after its loss of the Chinese mainland and retreat to Taiwan in 1949. Corruption was rampant in China under KMT rule, despite intermittent efforts at reform, and contributed to the Nationalist regime’s delegitimization and defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Yet, soon after arriving in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek led the party in a major restructuring and cleanup, the KMT Reconstruction (1950–52), that curbed organizational dysfunction and corruption and essentially re-founded the regime. I argue that this reform was successful because, while the motivation to reduce corruption had already existed at the top, only after the KMT’s challenging postwar transition did the winning combination of motivation, discretionary power, and state capacity come together. In addition, this chapter analyzes Chiang Ching-kuo’s leadership of the Governmental Rejuvenation (1969–72), which among other things helped reverse a rising trend of bureaucratic corruption. Corruption would only become widespread again in Taiwan after the onset of democratization in the late 1980s.

Chapter 4 assesses corruption control efforts by South Korea’s military-back authoritarian governments between the 1960s and 1980s. I argue that Park Chung-hee was a motivated reformer and had sufficient state capacity at his disposal but initially faced too many constraints on his leadership to curb corruption. Park came to power in a coup in 1961 and, as promised, launched a crackdown on corrupt politicians and businesspeople. However, Park had to contend with quasi-democratic institutions, powerful private economic actors, and other factors that made following through on anti-corruption reforms politically infeasible. This changed after Park consolidated personal power in the early 1970s, especially through the passage of the repressive Yushin constitution in 1972. Park was able to enact the General Administrative Reform (1973–77) to reduce corruption and strengthen South Korea’s developmental state. This chapter also discusses Chun Doo-hwan’s Purification campaign (1980–81), which was a more typical case of superficial anti-corruption efforts by an autocrat motivated by narrowly political considerations.

Chapter 6 presents a case study of Xi Jinping’s wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign. By all accounts, corruption continued to grow in China throughout the 1990s and 2000s and became among the public’s largest governance concerns. Xi and other party leaders believed that the combination under the Hu Jintao administration of policy failings like the spread of corruption, risky political liberalization, and general party weakness was precipitating a crisis in the CCP’s ability to govern. Since 2012, Xi has pursued anti-corruption campaign as part of his broader mission to restore party discipline and reassert party leadership over China’s state and society. I argue that his administration’s campaign, though not yet finished, has already been successful in curbing corruption. Furthermore, corruption was curbed under Xi using decidedly authoritarian methods. Benefiting Xi was the fact that he has faced far fewer constraints on his leadership than Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin did early in their administrations. The larger political implication of my findings in this chapter is that Xi is succeeding in strengthening CCP organization and discipline, which likely helps prolong one-party rule.