Chinas Corruption Rank and Global Standing | Generated by AI
Question: How does China rank in the world regarding its society/government corruption?
Answer:
China’s perceived level of public sector corruption is most commonly measured by the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) from Transparency International. This is the leading global indicator, based on expert assessments and surveys, scoring countries from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).
According to the latest available data from the Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 (published in February 2026):
- China has a score of 43/100.
- It ranks 76th out of 182 countries and territories.
- A higher rank number means more perceived corruption (i.e., rank 1 is the least corrupt).
- This places China in the middle range globally — better than many developing countries but far behind the least corrupt nations (e.g., Denmark at 89, Finland at 88, Singapore at 84).
- The score has remained stable (no change from the previous year), and China’s performance has historically fluctuated but stayed in the 35–45 range in recent decades, with a peak of 45 in 2021.
The global average score in 2025 is around 42, so China’s score is slightly above average. However, more than two-thirds of countries have stagnated or worsened over the past decade.
Other perspectives include the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (Control of Corruption percentile rank), where China scores around the 50th–60th percentile range in recent years (slightly above world average in some updates, with a 2024 estimate near 0.09 on the -2.5 to +2.5 scale, roughly in the middle globally).
Key notes:
- The CPI focuses on perceived public sector corruption (e.g., bribery, misuse of power).
- China’s government has run large-scale anti-corruption campaigns since 2012, targeting high-level officials, which some credit for modest improvements in earlier years, though perceptions remain middling.
- Rankings can vary slightly by source and year, but Transparency International’s CPI is the most widely referenced for international comparisons.
References:
- https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
- https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/china
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
- https://tradingeconomics.com/china/corruption-rank