China’s culture of shunkouliu (“slippery jingles”) offer a rare — and witty — outlet for political frustrations. Perry Link and Kate Zhou describe the shunkouliu in their book Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society. Invented by Chinese farmers, and once devoted to simple lessons of earth and toil, the medium mutated in the…
The U.S. Justice Department takes a stab at the question of who will watch the watchmen. Their answer: we will, but only after journalists exposed a series of interlocking scandals and weeks of non-stop political opposition drives the Attorney General out of his post. Justice today published a report detailing interference (.pdf) in Justice hiring…
The Global Integrity Report comprises about 15,000 local, peer-reviewed assessments every year, all of which is available to public scrutiny. A few of our readers take the time to dig into this raw data and challenge our results. Here’s what that process looks like from the inside. The short version is this: we benefit tremendously…
Earlier this week, the Chinese government ended earthquake-relief efforts in Sichuan province, withdrawing troops and transitioning from disaster relief to reconstruction. As they rebuild, critical issues of corruption and lax building codes may remain unaddressed. It seems clear that corruption and poor governance in China contributed to the impact of the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake.…
Disclosure — The World Bank is a funder of Global Integrity. The Wall Street Journal editorial board rips into the World Bank for giving US$640 million in few-strings-attached loans to Bangladesh and Vietnam, despite their abysmal records on corruption — a fact noted by the Banks’s own research. Wall Street Journal: Since May, Bangladesh’s military-backed…
During our Global Integrity Dialogue event in Kampala this past May, we met a number of local Ugandan journalists from the leading papers. As part of an ongoing conversation about the prospects and challenges for governance reform in Uganda, we asked our colleague Charles Muzale to describe the challenges facing journalists in Uganda. Among the…