EASC Colloquium: Xi Jinpings Anticorruption Campaign and the Future of China

Indiana University's East Asian Studies Center presents a lecture by Macabe Keliher, Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow, IU Maurer School of Law on Xi Jinping's Anticorruption Campaign and the Future of China.

Since inception three years ago, Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign has targeted some of China’s biggest political and military figures and implicated tens of thousands of cadres. This talk will argue that the current campaign should be distinguishedfrom the many others over the past thirty years not on account of its extensiveness, but rather in its coupling with two otherkey moves: institutional reform and disciplinary regulation. Together, these three initiatives aim to not only clean up the malfeasance, graft, and bribery pervasive in Chinese political life today, but also to change the political culture. I demonstrate that through these initiatives the current leadership is forcing a shift in political norms and behaviors, and changing theshared assumptions and practices that inform the political dealings of the society, from the approval of permits to the promotion of judges. I conclude with a discussion of three areas where further measures can be expected in the coming months and years: continued crackdowns, administrative adjustments, and system-wide experimental practices.

Macabe Keliher is a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. He received his PhD from Harvard University in History and East Asian Languages with a specialty in early modern and modern Chinese history. His research explores the intersection of culture and law in Chinese politicalorders and administrative organizations in both historical and contemporary context. He is currently turning his dissertation into a book on the formation of administrative law and political culture in seventeenth-century Qing China.

This lecture is the first of the East Asian Colloquium Series.