Pre-analysis plan for the impact of the introduction of leniency on bribery prosecutions in China

The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party passed on 23 October 2014 a "Decision concerning Several Major Issues in Comprehensively Advancing Governance According to Law" which stressed the current government's strong commitment to ght corruption. Among other measures, heavier penalties, including death penalty, are envisaged for those oering bribes, and severe restrictions to the leniency offered to bribe-givers. In order to understand the Chinese officials' dissatisfaction with the current legislation, which was introduced in 1997, we collected data on the investigations of bribery and public official corruption, available for most Chinese provinces for the period 1986-2010. The available evidence so far points to a substantial reduction in the number of major corruption cases around the 1997 reform, raising questions on the motivations for the newly proposed policy change.
However the data on prosecutions are subject to several limitations, in particular they cannot help disentangle deterrence from detection, or criminal activity from prosecution efforts, nor the details of the reform that produce the impact and through which channels. Moreover, some aspects of the legislative reform, such as the provision of leniency for the bribe-giver, were already in place since 1988. For this reason, we plan to collect and analyze more in depth a stratified random sample of prosecution case files between 1980 and 2010. Given that the sample size will be determined by power and budget considerations, we cannot gain any insight from these new data about the incidence of bribery in general.
We can instead observe the impact of the legislative reform on specific details of the corrupt behavior, and the mechanisms through which this behavior occurs or is deterred.