Kevin Yeh (葉一璋), executive director of Transparency International Chinese Taipei (TICT), found himself in the middle of a controversy when the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) headquarters released its annual Global Corruption Barometer last month. According to the international survey, Taiwan’s bribery rate is 36 percent, meaning that this rate of Taiwanese respondents said they paid a bribe when dealing with public services and institutions in the past 12 months. The report immediately sparked protest.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) objected to the findings, citing past data. Looking at the annual Global Corruption Barometers, there is a sharp and inexplicable difference in this year’s bribery rate compared with those of previous years — 3 percent in 2005, 2 percent in 2006 and 7 percent in 2010, said MOFA spokesperson Anna Kao (高安).
The pronounced increase in the bribery rate conflicts with another finding in the same survey: seventy-one percent of the respondents say the level of corruption in Taiwan has decreased a lot or a little over the past two years, she said.
GRAPHIC: Y. C. CHEN, TAIPEI TIMES
For TICT’s Yeh, also an associate professor at Shih Hsin University’s Department of Public Policy and Management, the truth about the survey may be forever unverifiable.
“As TI didn’t conduct the poll, many questions need to be redirected to the subcontractors, which could possibly embellish their answers,” he told the Taipei Times. But so far, TICT’s requests for information about the poll have yielded nothing very conclusive.
“We don’t have solid evidence to prove that the final Chinese version of the questionnaire we received is the same one [filled out by the respondents],” he said.
Lost in translation?
For Yeh and Kao, the Chinese version of the TI questionnaire that they saw includes serious design errors.
This year’s questionnaire, translated from an English version provided by TI, seems geared more toward the Chinese population than the Taiwanese. For example, the word corruption is translated as fubai (腐敗) instead of tanwu (貪污). In another question, respondents were asked if they knew of an anti-corruption and governance research center in China. This error appeared in a version of the survey that TI headquarters sent to TICT and MOFA. Pressed for an explanation, TI headquarters later said that the questionnaire released was outdated, and that the mistake had been corrected in a different questionnaire that actual respondents saw.
Yeh said that this year’s questionnaire also appeared to include outright translation errors. One question, which in its English original asked respondents whether they or their family members have ever paid a bribe, was translated to ask whether respondents had “witnessed” (目睹) bribery. A second question reverses the structure of a response scale. The original question in English asked respondents to indicate how the level of corruption has changed using a scale of one to five, with one meaning “decreased a lot” and five meaning “increased a lot.” This scale is reversed on the Chinese-language questionnaire. TI headquarters later said they discovered the error and corrected it when analyzing poll responses. According to TI, the survey’s results are correct, even though the question is wrong.
Yeh says that additional errors may have been created by how the survey was conducted — online. “In Taiwan, we usually conduct surveys through telephone interviews because when the elders answer the phone, we can read the questions in Taiwanese,” Yeh explains. “Many people may not have access to or understand online surveys in Chinese. The sample of people can be more representative [of the population] over the telephone.”
Technical problems aside, Yeh believes the biggest controversy is the fact that a political survey about Taiwan was done by a company in China, where “public polls are not allowed.” He says it is like “asking Pakistan to do a survey about India, or Cuba to carry out a poll about the US.”
Whodunit
The organization that conducted the poll is Jisibar, a Beijing-based market survey firm that was handling the Taiwan poll for the first time. According to the company Web site, Jisibar “helps businesses to improve their products” by encouraging consumers “to participate in surveys to win golden coins, Q money [a virtual currency by Chinese IT company Tencent], digital products and more.”
TI headquarters had originally stated that it commissioned Worldwide Independent Network/Gallup International Association (WIN/GIA) to conduct the Global Corruption Barometer 2013, and that the Taiwan survey was carried out by the Shanghai-based WisdomAsia Marketing & Research Consulting.
Shortly afterward, WisdomAsia denied having taken on the case. TI later admitted their mistake was the result of poor communication between the TI Secretariat and WIN/GIA, and announced that Cass Research Center (CRC) — a China-based partner of WIN/GIA — had conducted the survey.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Apple Daily reported that a CRC employee surnamed Zhou (周) claimed his company then subcontracted the survey to a firm in Taiwan, but wouldn’t say which one.
Eventually, TI clarified that the corruption surveys in 2010 and 2013 were subcontracted to CRC through WIN/GIA. The 2010 poll was done by Survey Sampling International (SSI), also a Chinese company. This year, it was Jisibar.
“According to WIN/GIA, the project manager responsible for the survey in 2010 moved from SSI to Jisibar. For the 2013 survey, CRC subcontracted to Jisibar, so the fieldwork was therefore conducted under the same management,” the TI Secretariat tells the Taipei Times.
Questions
Yeh said TICT suggested in 2010 and 2011 that it was improper to allow Chinese companies to conduct the survey, but the head office didn’t accept the suggestion.
In response, TI says it is standard to commission the survey globally and to use an experienced global company for centralized quality control.
In 2007, the corruption survey was carried out by Opinion Research Taiwan, but the Taiwanese firm “seems to have gone out of business, which would explain why WIN/GIA no longer uses this affiliate,” the TI Secretariat says.
Asked whether Chinese polling firms specializing in commercial — not political — surveys have the expertise required for conducting public polls in Taiwan, TI replies that the Global Corruption Barometer follows international standard practice in data collection and analysis.
“WIN/GIA is an established survey company with extensive experience in cross-country survey work and with the Global Corruption Barometer survey in particular. Their network is made up of independent survey research firms that are held to international research standards (ESOMAR),” its secretariat says.
TICT, for its part, is planning to commission a local academic institution to do a new survey so as to better understand the public’s experiences with bribery in Taiwan.
“But it doesn’t mean that we are going to redo the survey. The aim is not to compare the new results with [TI’s] report,” Yeh says.
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