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To judge by some of the best-known measures, Taiwan's progress in fighting corruption over the last two decades has been almost nil. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index put out by Transparency International (TI), not to mention the World Governance Indicators published by the World Bank, Taiwan is doing little better today than in 1996.1 Yet experts familiar with the country disagree, and are more upbeat about Taiwan's anticorruption efforts: The Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), which relies on the views of specialists, gives Taiwan the best score a country can get for "prosecution of office abuse" (that is, for using the law to go after public officials who exploit their offices to serve private ends).2 Moreover, the share of people who report having personally experienced corruption is low, and on par with figures from countries such as Germany, France, and Austria.3 Yet despite the government's intensifying fight against corruption and these low levels of direct experience with it, the overwhelming bulk of people who live or do business in Taiwan still think that the situation has not improved at all.
This shows the pitfalls of using perceptions-based indicators to gauge the extent of corruption, at least in a country where bribery and other forms of "abusing public office for private gain" (the World Bank's definition of corruption) do not go on in the open. The irony is that instances of effective corruption control in action-the arrests and convictions of politicians and businesspeople for crooked dealings-are what spread the perception that corruption is out of hand. From one vantage point, it is depressing to read of Taiwanese judges, lawmakers, and other high officials (including an ex-president) being charged with corruption. Yet from another angle, it is a good sign that they were not only indicted, but were indicted by their own administrations. These are plainly not cases of political revenge, which implies that ethical universalism-the government's fair and equal treatment of everyone-is on the rise in Taiwan. However widespread corruption may be, the probability that corrupt activities will be found out, investigated, and punished has gone up significantly over the last two decades.
Since this island 180 kilometers off the Asian mainland became democratic in 1992, and especially since the long-ruling Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang...