Based on interviews in local commissions of China’s Party discipline inspection (CDIs), this article investigates the effectiveness, internal limits and selectiveness of CDIs in the anticorruption campaign. It uses a micro-level analysis to explore the role of law in affecting the CDIs’ anticorruption work and concludes that local CDIs remain heavily affected by the same-level local governments, but are effective in combating local corruption due to recent reforms that have strengthened higher-level CDIs’ control over lower-level CDIs. The current internal decision-making systems of the CDIs make their anticorruption work heavily dependent upon the central leadership. Their work is still not institutionalized and relies heavily on higher-level intervention. Nevertheless, law played a crucial role by providing the bottom lines to set the decision-making standards at different stages. Legal reforms should aim to further clarify and lift these baseline standards.
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Li et al. (2015) studied this question.