China may further empower corruption-fighting agency

China’s Communist Party will likely increase the power of their secretive Central Commission for Discipline Inspection agency during the upcoming Central Committee plenum, The Wall Street Journal reported. Continuing President Xi’s anticorruption campaign, the Party is seeking a more long-term and consistent approach to fighting corruption rather than the short but intense on-and-off campaigns to date. This will include streamlining the party’s fragmented and localized antigraft bodies into a more cohesive nationwide approach. A Claremont McKenna researcher who estimated that fraud, kickbacks and other corruption was coming as a direct annual cost to China’s economy of $86bn five years ago now thinks that number is “multiples higher.”