Political corruption, transparency and citizen movements: a comparative approach between China and Japan

Political corruption is one of the most important issues for the Xi Jinping's government and Chinese society in general. This article analyses the harmful effects of corruption on certain social, economic and institutional variables. First, it presents the current state of political corruption in China and it explores some social movements that have emerged in response to this phenomenon. The corruption perceptions index (prepared by Transparency International) and the control of corruption index (one of the six governance indicators developed by the World Bank) have been used as indicators of corruption. The study was then extended to Japan as a country with a different political and economic context than China. Based on the data obtained, a comparative analysis of the state of corruption between the two countries was carried out. We have studied the correlations of the previous indicators with the degree of freedom (published by Freedom House) and with the Gross Domestic Product per capita (published by the World Bank) in recent years.