SAINTS OR THIEVES: CORRUPTION AND THE CHINESE DILEMMA
By: Eric X. Li
At last, Bo Xilai is going on trial. The case against the former Politburo member brings to a climax the aggressive anti-corruption drive undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the new general secretary Xi Jinping has identified corruption as a threat to the very survival of the party-state. Many political commentators have actually proclaimed that severe corruption is inherent to China’s one-party system and cannot be contained without anything short of changing the entire political system. Perhaps it is time to examine corruption in the larger historic and intellectual context.
Corruption, in its contemporary form, has been a subject of global attention and scholarship in the last twenty years. Before that, the Cold War shielded rampant corruption behind ideologies. Marcos and Suharto were corrupt but protected by the Western alliance and the same happened on the other side. Since then the amount of research and literature on the topic has been vast. So what have we learned?
First, a global consensus on corruption was formed, without much empirical data, very early in this 20-year period. The consensus went as follows: Corruption happens because of incomplete economic liberalization, lack of political competition, no independent judiciary, no freedom of the press, and a weak civil society. Furthermore, standardized measurement systems were developed to produce single-dimension indexes where corruption is for the most part equated with illegal bribery. According to such indexes, corruption is qualitatively the same across all countries and varies only in quantity. Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is the most authoritative among such indexes. Since the root causes are the same everywhere and the severity of the problem can be accurately measured, it was only natural to conclude that there was a standardized prescription, namely, economic liberalization (i.e. privatization), political opening (i.e. multi-party elections), independent judiciary, press freedom, and civil society. Professor Michael Johnston summarizes this development in his book Syndromes of Corruption.
Along with popular “how-to-get-rich” books, a myriad of “how-to” books were issued by respected institutions such as USAID’s Handbook for Fighting Corruption, World Bank’s Helping Countries Combat Corruption, UNDP’s Corruption and Good Governance. But like their commercial cousins, there is only one problem to these “how-to” books: they don’t quite work.
Take the example of Indonesia. After forty years of severe corruption during the Sukarno-Suharto eras, the country began to implement all the prescriptions in the “how-to” books in 1998. More than sixty political parties were formed to compete in elections, the press was set free, judges became independent, and companies were privatized. Yet, just about every study has shown corruption has gotten worse. In the words of Professor Andrew MacIntyre, Indonesia went from “one Suharto to hundreds of little Suhartos”. Examples like this abound, particularly in the developing world.
In recent years, many scholars have begun to re-examine the dominant consensus. The academic world has learned that corruption is a complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-faceted phenomenon. Furthermore, corruption and its effects vary qualitatively across different places and are nearly impossible to measure (Williams & Beare 1999; Rose-Ackerman 1999).
