TAIPEI (AFP) ― China’s armed forces are battling a major corruption problem, with little political oversight and no whistleblower mechanism to counter graft, watchdog Transparency International said Tuesday.

China, which has the world’s largest active military, scored as a “high-risk” country on a new global index on defense establishment corruption launched by the Berlin-based organization at a press conference in Taiwan.

“The Chinese military acknowledges that there is a major corruption issue through its various promulgations, and it has put a variety of measures in place to limit this major concern,” said Mark Pyman, director of the organization’s Defense and Security Program.

However, he said it is uncertain how effective these measures are, since the military does not allow the level of scrutiny required to ensure an anti-graft campaign is succeeding.

“There are many areas where China is weak in its protections against corruption in its defense sector, and it has very low oversight of defense and armed forces policy and no effective whistleblower system,” Pyman said.

China’s new leader Xi Jinping has made the fight against corruption one of his priorities since he became Communist Party chief in November. But the problem is that the Chinese military is “a closed system,” according to Kevin Yeh, director of Transparency International’s Taiwan chapter.

“The military and the party have greater power than the executive branch of the government,” said Yeh, who is also a professor in business management at Shih Hsin University in Taipei.

“What’s worse, China doesn’t have a dedicated agency capable of supervising the corruption fight. It has to rely on its controls from the inside and that makes the military not transparent and easily leads to corruption.”

One of the major problems in China is the absence of private military defense contractors, meaning less scope for competition, Transparency International said in a report accompanying the index.

Pyman said the armed forces’ corruption problem was also manifested in the thousands of military-linked enterprises engaged in profit-oriented business.

“What is positive is that the Chinese military has been taking corruption seriously,” said Pyman.

“For example, they have been making big efforts to close down or transfer the ownership of these enterprises.”

The organization also said in its report that the centralized structure of the Chinese state apparatus made the defense sector more prone to corruption.