Lei Luo, Jiali Li, Wenting Ma
The essence of corruption lies in the illicit exchange between public power and private interests, and its governance requires a dual-dimensional approach integrating legal norms and psychological cognition. Taking Chapter VIII (Crimes of Embezzlement and Bribery) of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China and the Supervision Law of the People’s Republic of China as the core legal analytical framework, and supplemented by psychological theories such as Bandura’s reciprocal determinism, this study conducts an in-depth analysis of three representative adjudicated corruption cases involving Yu Jike, Li Jie, and Li Mingqiang. The findings reveal that psychological factors—including chance-taking mentality, social comparison, and compensatory mentality—interact dynamically with external conditions such as institutional loopholes and subcultural erosion, jointly forming the generative and evolutionary mechanism of corrupt behavior. However, under criminal law, psychological motivation only constitutes a discretionary sentencing circumstance and does not affect the determination of constitutive elements of a crime. Accordingly, this paper proposes a three-pronged rule-of-law governance pathway aligned with the Three "Nos" Anti-Corruption Framework (no audacity to corrupt, no opportunity to corrupt, no desire to corrupt): strengthening deterrence through strict punishment, restricting power operation within institutional cages through systemic constraints, and consolidating ideological defense lines through psychological prevention. These three pathways target key nodes of corrupt psychology at different stages, collectively forming a closed-loop governance system. The analytical approach adopted here also offers a reference for cross-national research on the psychological mechanisms of corruption among public officials.