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In autocracies facing widespread corruption, the allocation of the scant attention available for fighting corruption strongly affects corruption control. Although research has found that authoritarian regimes tend to fight corruption selectively, it is unknown whether and how autocracies allocate attention across different policy areas to combat corruption. We propose that single‐party authoritarian regimes can steer anticorruption attention to the policy domains prioritized by the central authority through the mechanism of cross‐organizational policy coordination. Using original datasets compiled from Chinese governmental and procuratorial policy papers from 1998 to 2016, we demonstrate that Chinese prosecutors direct anticorruption attention to the policy domains accentuated in the central government's major reforms. Our field interviews support this finding and reveal possible disruption of anticorruption efforts in policy domains falling off the central government's top list. Thus, we extend the research on political influence over anticorruption agencies and show that single‐party regimes can instrumentalize anticorruption to serve the government's policy agenda, driving the allocation of limited anticorruption attention across policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, China's fiscal system has facilitated the initiation and implementation of economic reforms and greatly contributed to China's remarkable economic achievements. However, weaknesses of the fiscal system have been exposed that have aroused concerns about the weakening of state capacity. While many have discussed the loss of central fiscal control over localities under decentralization and its negative consequences, not enough attention has been paid to another major problem: the diffusion of fiscal power to nonfiscal government departments. In this article, I argue that the existence of the extra-budgetary system has granted ad hoc taxation power to nonfiscal departments and led to the mismanagement of fiscal revenue. Compared with the vertical diffusion of fiscal power, i.e., the devolution of fiscal authority from central to lower-level governments, the horizontal diffusion of fiscal power is more difficult to control and more detrimental to the institutionalization of China's fiscal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]