Institutional Foundations of China — Russia Anti-Corruption Cooperation and Prospects for Developing Joint Anti-Corruption Strategies

Abstract

Cross-border corruption is no longer a marginal irritant — it has grown into a systemic risk that chips away at governance quality, corrodes public confidence, and warps competitive dynamics across the Eurasian landmass. China and Russia both launched sweeping overhauls of their domestic anti-corruption machinery after 2012, yet surprisingly little scholarly work has tackled the bilateral cooperation angle head-on. This study digs into the institutional scaffolding that holds Chinese — Russian anti-corruption engagement together, tracking its evolution fr om sporadic mutual legal assistance exchanges to a layered framework woven into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The research aim is to pin down wh ere the two countries’ anti-corruption regimes genuinely complement each other — and where they grind against one another — and then to gauge whether joint strategic instruments are realistic. Relying on comparative institutional analysis, the study works through bilateral treaties, multilateral declarations, regulatory texts, and enforcement figures for 2013–2025. It is worth flagging that China’s creation of the National Supervisory Commission (NSC) in 2018 marked a decisive turn from campaign-style enforcement toward institutionalized oversight, while Russia’s UNCAC-era reforms broadened the legal scaffolding for cross-border judicial collaboration. Four distinct cooperation tiers emerged from the analysis: treaty-based mutual legal assistance, multilateral platform coordination, sector-targeted compliance mechanisms, and still-embryonic digital governance tools — each at a different stage of maturity and running into different operational walls. Asymmetries in institutional architecture, evidentiary thresholds, and asset recovery procedures stand out as the main drag on deeper integration. The article feeds into the growing literature on South-South anti-corruption governance by proposing a typology of cooperation modalities and sketching a phased bilateral strategy anchored in SCO and BRICS normative frameworks.

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