China’s commitment to the United Nations Convention against Corruption

In its 2012 survey covering 178 countries, Transparency International ranked China at 3.5 in what is called the Corruption Perception Index, the 80th country, together with Serbia and Trinidad and Tobago. To see things from another point of view, China was the fourth-lowest ranking of G20 nations with only Argentina, India, Indonesia and Russia scoring lower. At such levels, corruption poses a threat to China’s political stability and sustainable development, especially at a time when China’s ‘Gini’ coefficient, a statistical measure of income inequality, is at 0.47 close to that 0.5 threshold where inequality is severe and calls for immediate action. Many experts believe that this widening wealth gap is partly the result of large amounts of “illegal income” resulting from corruption.