Editor's note

• Author: JIANG Dong
• Pages: 337-338

FRONTIERS OF LAW IN CHINA

VOL. 12 SEPTEMBER 2017 NO. 3

DOI 10.3868/s050-006-017-0018-8

FOCUS

ANTI-CORRUPTION: AN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIR WITH DOMESTIC EFFORTS

EDITOR’S NOTE

JIANG Dong*

Globalization makes corruption international. From the 1970’s onwards, domestic

laws and international conventions have been formulated to curb corruption in the

international arena. The focus of this issue includes two articles on how to deal with

anti-corruption in the international and domestic legal systems.

Professor Dan Hough’s article focuses on whether international anti-corruption legal

mechanism works as it is designed to be. According to Professor Hough’s analysis, even

though the international anti-corruption laws, such as United Nations Convention against

Corruption and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s

anti-bribery treaty, are “softer” than national law, they are making progress anyway. The

real challenge of fighting corruption internationally is not how to expand the “circle of

friends” for the international anti-corruption laws through inviting more signatory states,

it is rather an inward issue of whether a country is under rule of law. A well enacted

anti-corruption law cannot achieve its goals in a non-regulatory state, due to the lack of

mentality and institutions to push it forward. Tactically, to generate more international

anti-corruption cooperation for the benefits of perfecting the international anti corruption

laws, it will be feasible for states to spot and address issues with many common interests.

The foundation should be laid on the states’ domestic rule of law with shared values and

common practice in order to make the international anti-corruption regime more long

lasting and more effective.

Professor JIANG Dong’s article discusses China’s option of whether to enact a special

anti-extraterritorial corruption act or not. In terms of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment,

China ranks second in the world and the expansion of Chinese economic force is

accompanying with the occurrence of foreign bribery. Tremendous work has been done in

China to crack down the domestic corruption, while much less is done to deal with the

foreign bribery. China’s latest effort of anti-foreign bribery is the sentence amendment of

* (姜栋) Ph.D. in Legal History, School of Law, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China; Associate

Professor in Legal History, School of Law, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China. Contact:

djiang@ruc.edu.cn