Half measures
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Training corruption busters through a master's program may enhance their effectiveness in the anti-graft fight, but will do little to root out the widespread practice.
The master's degree, for which a memorandum of cooperation was recently inked by the Supreme People's Procuratorate and Renmin University, will just be a blip on the radar in the battle against power abuse.
Academic studies into corruption as a social and political phenomenon will only go so far in buttressing the anti-graft fight, and the proposed program may just net some post-graduates a job in a shrinking market.
The problem we face is not inability to identify corrupt behavior. Such practices have become so pervasive that it takes little more than commonsense to ferret out a solution.
The lacuna is in the lack of political will to fight it tooth and nail.
If at all any academic support is required to boost the anti-corruption campaign, it should come from studies on effective governance, or more specifically, placing public officials under meaningful oversight.
Since corruption takes place where the weak links of the system are, if institutions of higher learning, and scholars affiliated to them, care to lend a helping hand in the fight, it should be through mending the system.
A new academic discipline is not the way to go about it.
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