“I don’t see any clear political will” to seriously punish corrupt officials at the grassroots level, said Fu Hualing, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. “Maybe they understand that is probably very destructive if China does that in every county, every district,” he said. “The whole country would probably be in chaos.”

The campaign’s stated aim is to hold all levels of Chinese officials accountable for abuses of power. Many scholars of Chinese government say its underlying purpose is to make party cadres more responsive to orders from on high while burnishing the party’s image.
But the new study finds that the higher the number of reported graft cases in

 a prefecture, the more people in the area perceive Beijing as being more corrupt than their local government.
Ni Xing and Li Zhen at the Institute of Governance and Public Affairs of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University, who conducted the study, attribute this finding to the centralisation of power.“If local government is overflowing with corruption, people will gradually shift responsibility for that to the centre as they perceive the centre’s failure of management to have led to such a state of affairs,” they write.

The study, which surveyed 83,300 people nationwide by telephone, was published in the latest edition of China’s Journal of Public Administration. The findings suggest that the campaign’s scope and length may inflict lasting damage on the party leadership’s image.