ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the varied strategies that the military and civilian leadership have used to combat military corruption, and evaluates the relative effectiveness of these measures. The measures are examined at four levels: normative, legal, financial, and organizational. On the normative level, attention will be paid to the series of “Lei Feng” and other model soldier campaigns directed against illegal economic behavior as well as the content of political study sessions and party committee meetings. At the legal level, changing PLA codes relating to military businesses will be analyzed, with particular emphasis on the “Ten No’s” and officer conduct code revisions. At the financial level, national-level audits will be examined as well as the relative success of the internal military banking system implemented by military region logistics departments. At the organizational level, this chapter will examine both the conglomerization of the enterprise system and the rectification campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to divestiture in 1998, the organizational measures, most notably the 1993–95 rectification campaign led by Zhang Gong, appear to have been the most successful of the four in reducing the amount of corruption in the ranks by deepening the conglomerization of the enterprise system and separating lower-level military units from their enterprises. In retrospect, these organizational reforms foreshadowed and facilitated divestiture.
