Cooperation against Corruption in the Best Interests of Both US and China

On Sept. 18, the U.S. Justice and State Departments worked in close coordination with their Chinese counterparts to forcibly repatriate Yang Jinjun, a suspect under charges of corruption and bribery who fled to the United States and had been living there for 14 years. This marks the first time that the United States has repatriated an individual on China’s published “100 most wanted list,” signifying the beginnings of a gradual uptick in U.S.-Chinese cooperation on international anti-corruption cases.

The cooperation is beneficial to the two nations as both a response to the pressing need to achieve graft-free governance and a catalyst to encourage a market environment of fair competition. The interests of both nations provide strong motivation for collaboration in such instances, and serve as both the primary reason and staunchest pillar supporting collaboration on anti-corruption matters.

China sorely needs to clean its political house of corruption. Sustaining pressure on settling individual cases will buy it time to attack the root of the problem and create political and societal conditions favorable to consolidating its economic gains. Meanwhile, the United States’ willingness to help track down fled criminals and their ill-gotten spoils also stems from considerations regarding its own interests. First, there is the fact that as corruption becomes increasingly of an international nature, any member of the global village is directly or indirectly susceptible to being negatively affected by corruption within another nation, and the United States is no exception. In terms of self-protection, the United States has no choice but to closely cooperate with China on anti-corruption cases. And in another sense, the deepening reliance of U.S. economic development on China is another key reason why the United States will accommodate Chinese efforts to strike at corrupt officials. China is now the United States’ second largest trading partner, and the U.S. economic recovery is intimately linked with the Chinese market and Chinese products. Cracking down on corruption within China will create a more open and transparent market environment, lower transaction costs, and augment the effectiveness of U.S. investments, constituting an enormous economic incentive that will entice the United States to lend a hand to Chinese anti-corruption efforts. If there are no eternal allies and only perpetual interests in foreign relations, when it comes to international cooperation on fighting corruption, perpetual interests will make for eternal allies.

It is precisely due to this precondition that actions be consistent with the mutual interest of both parties that U.S.-Chinese collaboration has gone from wading in the mud with reluctant steps to speeding the Autobahn in such a short span of time. A series of substantive cooperative frameworks and systems has been produced in short order, making mutually beneficial cooperation on recovering fugitives and their stolen assets increasingly the norm. And anchoring these efforts are not only international agreements such as the United Nations Convention against Corruption and Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, but also new and more concrete cooperative frameworks that are being produced one after another. Thus, interests provide the drive, and systems the foundation, for achieving great things in the United States and China’s joint anti-corruption agenda. Since China’s Ministry of Public Security began “Operation Fox Hunt” in 2013, a great number of unscrupulous officials who had fled to the United States have been apprehended and repatriated to stand trial. Events prove time and again that the United States has long since ceased to be a haven for China’s corrupt.

Of course, there yet exist complicating factors between the two nations, such as differences in their societal and legal systems and the lack of a signed extradition treaty. However, this does not preclude them from strengthening cooperation through substitute methods such as investigations into visa fraud and money laundering. The healthy development of these efforts on the part of the United States and China will become an important example to look back upon when establishing a new international order to combat corruption.

The author is deputy director of Beihang University’s Integrity Research and Education Center.