China may be getting serious on corruption internally, but allowing foreign institutions to guide this fight remains a sensitive matter. Transparency International (TI), one of the world's leading anti-corruption NGOs, has sought many times to help Beijing crack down on graft but has not always found a welcoming ear.

China ranks 75th out of 182 countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) with a score of 3.6 out of 10, 0.1 lower than 2010's evaluation. By comparison, Somalia's score of 1.0 is at the bottom of the list, according to an index released by TI, a Berlin-based organization monitoring corporate and political corruption throughout the world, in December 2011.

On the surface, China has secured a measure of international help in this anti-corruption fight by starting to cooperate with the International Association of Anti-Corruption Authorities (IAACA) and TI a decade ago. However, most exchanges are low-key and cautious, as many officials do not believe the international NGOs are purely here to help.

"Just as some in the West are biased against China, China has prejudice and bias toward the West too," Ren Jianming, a professor from the School of Public Policy and Management at Beihang University, told the Global Times.

Through Ren's work in China's cooperation with TI and IAACA, he sees this international cooperation as a helpful platform rather than foreign intervention, calling it a chance for China to show its efforts and seek help to deal with this pernicious issue.

Love-hate relationship

Ten years ago, almost all TI staff viewed China as a country with a poor human rights record and virtually no social organizations, recalls Liao Ran, a senior program coordinator with the organization.

As the only Chinese employee at TI, Liao tried to persuade his international colleagues that China was worth working with. "To engaging with China, it is not easy to find the right way. But if we did't go there, we had already got lost," he told them.

However, many government officials in China viewed this as a "humiliation" and showed no interest in cooperation. Zhao Zenghui, a Shanghai discipline inspection official, reportedly stated at a meeting that some government officials called for caution before working with TI as it might have "a hidden motive."

A breakthrough was the book National Integrity System, which staff at TI spent two years working on. When it was translated into Chinese, the book helped to build trust between two sides as it explains what TI's integrity system really was and how it works, Liao said.

The integrity system looks at how a system or government is performing its intended missions without being impaired or hindered by drag factors such as corruption.

Fighting shadowy enemy

Chinese officials changed their attitude toward TI altogether in 2008 after President Hu Jintao called for China to learn from other countries' experiences fighting corruption. China formally joined TI that very year.

"From resistance to cooperation, China has improved significantly over the past 10 years," Liao told the Global Times.

"China wasn't really qualified to join TI but the organization bended the rules to make it happen. Now China has become an indispensable member for TI," Ren explained.

The rules Ren referred to really meant an agreement that China would have to renew its membership every three years, instead of the permanent memberships given to some "clean" countries.

Since then, TI experts have been invited to inspect China's Three Gorges Dam project, the world's largest hydropower complex that cost billions of yuan. TI also surveyed Beijing's multi-billion-dollar Olympic Games venues. Anti-corruption experts were invited from Britain to train the Beijing Organizing Committee on how to ensure the Olympics remain free of graft.

However, for some government officials, such cooperation was not necessary. By press time, the Global Times has not yet received answers to its interview request from the Discipline Inspection Association, under the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC, that worked with TI.

The director in charge of international cooperation stated only that there had been no work with TI in the past few years, without providing further explanation.

Professor Ren said this attitude was due to suspicions running deep through conservative official ranks.

"In their minds, they think the government should have a big say in everything," Ren said. "But it is unacceptable in a civil society."

So how corrupt is China exactly? Liao says China's leaders have already answered that question. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPC, pledged to tackle corruption in his public address at the debut of the newly elected members to the Standing Committee of the 18th CPC Central Committee Political Bureau on November 15.

Xi warned that China might face "seething public anger, civil unrest and government collapse" if it did not root out all forms of corruption. A week later, speaking at a learning session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, he again ordered all Party members to strictly obey the Party Constitution, or else corruption could "kill the Party and ruin the country."

Over 4.2 million government officials, including former Shanghai Party chief Chen Liangyu, have been tried on corruption charges between 2003 and 2011, according to Cui Hairong, deputy director of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention.

Anti-corruption organs nationwide were notified of 1.35 million cases via an online reporting system in 2011, Cui added. A TI report in 2011 also found that China and Russia were the most likely out of 28 countries surveyed to have business executives who try to bribe foreign officials when working abroad.

Some 18,000 officials and employees of State-owned companies left China with assets 800 billion yuan from the mid-1990s until 2008, according a report by China's central bank. This capital flight is often thought to be mostly carried out by corrupt officials, seeking to flee retribution.

Acting as watchdogs

A frustrated public has been paying much closer attention of late to China's anti-corruption moves. Over 63 percent of 10,219 respondents to a China Youth Daily survey in November said the country must disclose officials' assets, while 59 percent they would become personally involved in fighting corruption if it continued.

Asset disclosures for Chinese officials was one of TI's proposals that Chinese officials struggled with when it was tabled back in 2004, Liao said. However, today, it is being widely discussed among the top echelons of the government officials.

Wang Yang, Guangdong's Party Secretary, told the reporters after the congress transitions that his province is exploring methods to put this system in place, although he did not provide a timetable.

Liao said asset disclosure is a prerequisite for fighting corruption that as yet is missing in China.

Lei Chuang, 25, a graduate student from Shanghai who made headlines when he wrote to 53 government agencies requesting that they disclose their income, told the Global Times that without an effective government watchdog, China needs public supervision to tackle the corruption issue.

"Individuals like me can't keep pushing the issue forward all the time. China needs international NGOs and the public to serve as watchdogs," he said.

Earlier in September, several Chinese anti-corruption agencies organized classes to teach officials about basic tools to use in anti-corruption battles, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

However, more and more people have started losing their faith as corruption continually plagues the country. Critics say that China's supervision of its own anti-corruption efforts is akin to using its right hand to chop off its left. 

Liao said the fall of Yang Dacai, head of the Shaanxi Administration of Work Safety, who was uncovered by netizens as owning a vast collection of expensive watches, reflects the role the online community can play as a supervising entity.

Speaking at the closing ceremony of the Sixth IAACA Annual Conference in October, Cao Jianming, IAACA president and procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China, urged that all member states set up mutual legal assistance.

However, in an earlier interview with the Southern Weekly, Liao admitted that the CPI index has flaws. Its credibility has been question but TI also often fields calls from low-ranked countries asking how they can improve. 

"The ranking in recent years has not seemed to match reality," he said. "Take Somalia being bottom for example, people there are too poor to corrupt."

Finding new battle grounds

Differing from cautious government officials and agencies, China's open-minded younger generation is easier to approach.

Integrity Action, formerly Tiri, an independent NGO whose mission is to empower citizens to act with and demand integrity, started an Integrity Education Network in China back in 2004.

Over 5,000 students in China received integrity education in 2010. The organization also hosts a global library of documents on corruption and integrity, some of which have been translated into Chinese, according to its 2011 annual report.

Likewise, TI helped Peking University set up a student group in 2005 to help students from different backgrounds receive integrity education.

TI's China office is based in Tsinghua University, under the Anti-Corruption Government Research Center, China's first university-based institute devoted to anti-corruption research.

It is estimated that there are over three million NGOs in China, yet 90 percent of them are not legally registered, China Youth Daily reported.

However, TI believes NGOs are essential and must play important roles as initiators and implementers of social reform, including anti-corruption.

"The prevailing tendency is to fear NGOs as potential anti-government forces. Civil unrest in China, however, is not a result of NGOs but of the painful transition from an agrarian society into an urban society," said TI's Fighting Corruption in China report.