Global index reflects China's efforts to bring corruption to light

If there is one domestic policy that has epitomised Xi Jinping's time in office so thus far, it is his attempts to tackle corruption. His high-profile and wide-ranging campaign to bring graft under control has been followed closely around the world, as thousands of "flies" and, more surprisingly, some of the biggest of the "tigers" have found themselves in trouble.

Corruption campaigns come and go in China, and some have had much broader, political (and personal) aims that went beyond any apparent willingness to get rid of corrupt officials. However, in recent times, none have had either the breadth or the depth of this one.

But how successful has Xi's tirade been? According to the latest data from Transparency International, one of the most well-known global anti-corruption non-governmental organisations, the answer is "not very". Every year it produces a Corruption Perceptions Index where it scores countries on the amount of corruption it believes exists in that state's public sector.

The 2014 index, announced to much fanfare in Berlin this week, shows China's score slipping from 40 to 36. That means a slide from joint 80th in the table to joint 100th. That's still a long way above the bottom two of North Korea and Somalia, who both scored a mere eight, but not the type of result that anti-corruption campaigners in China will have been hoping for.

There is, however, reason to be rather more positive than this gloomy picture might lead us to believe. Firstly, we should be very careful of reading too much into these numbers.

Transparency International officials themselves are careful to stress that the data they produce is based on perceptions - and perceptions can, of course, be deceptive - and that they are not trying to tell us how much corruption actually exists in each given country. Besides, this is about perceptions in the public sector, and deliberately doesn't include things such as business-to-business transactions.

Transparency International is also quick to acknowledge that one could - and many do - find problems with the way they process the data. If they dig deep enough, critics can find all sorts of methodological quirks and oddities that might make one question the validity of the data that has been produced.

Over and above these rather dry statistical issues, there are more substantive reasons to be just a little more relaxed about this. When an anti-corruption campaign is launched, people inevitably become more aware of the corruption around them.

Britain, for example, saw its Corruption Perceptions Index score (then on a scale of 1 to 10) drop from 8.4 in 2007 to 7.7 in 2008. Why? The answer has much to do with the fact that British people spent a lot of that period talking about, and assessing the legacy of, a rather parochial parliamentary expenses episode that gripped the country's public consciousness; the score, in other words, went down simply as people became more aware of alleged corruption in Parliament.

Yet the behaviour of MPs, in terms of the expenses that they claimed at least, almost certainly improved - no one wanted to be the next person to fall foul of the court of public opinion and MPs became positively petrified of getting their expenses claims wrong. So, despite the dip in scores, there seemed little evidence that corruption - inside or outside Parliament - was actually getting worse.

A similar trend may well be evident in China. The sheer scope and scale of the anti-corruption drive makes everyone - whether you're a bureaucrat in Beijing, a factory worker in Guangzhou or a farmer in the Guangxi countryside - aware that corruption is a real issue.

That it was an issue before Xi took power is not the point, it's being discussed openly in a way that has rarely been done before. If more than 75,000 citizens have been investigated for corruption since Xi took power, then surely there must be just as many who haven't but who are, or have been, conducting their business in similar ways?

China is experiencing precisely what Britain did in 2007 and 2008. There is no guarantee that China's scores will improve (Britain's have not risen back to the level that they were at before), but it certainly should not be a surprise that they take a drop now.

What that actually means is an altogether different matter. China is certainly talking about corruption in a way it has rarely done in the past. And that, no matter where it sits in indices like the Corruption Perceptions Index, is almost certainly a good thing.

Professor Dan Hough is director of the Sussex Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, UK