CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

162 Syndromes of Corruption
market and banking reform, mean they would be allocated on sound
economic criteria; instead, funds were advanced to politicos and their
business protégés, often with no expectation of repayment. After about
1988 officials began to build informal coalitions with entrepreneurs based
on shared interests and interpenetrating powers and assets, with political
connections becoming more valuable to entrepreneurs of many sorts
(Choi and Zhou, 2001). State and party power remain important, but
ineffective oversight and weakened political discipline have turned scattered
fragments of authority into valuable commodities for exploitation.
Not only party and state officials, but also professionals such as reporters,
lawyers, teachers, and doctors, solicit money and favors with little systematic
restraint. International businesses found that officials at many
levels expected payments, and while a contract might describe desirable
outcomes it did not guarantee results or protect rights.
Assessing the full scope of corruption in China with precision is impossible.
Official figures are unreliable, and reforms are changing both official
rules and day-to-day norms. Wedeman (2004) argues that corruption
accelerated beginning in the mid-1990s, but that China is still not exceptionally
corrupt either in global terms or by historical standards. In 2001
alone the state’s People’s Procuratorates handled 36,477 corruption
cases worth 4.1 billion yuan and involving 40,195 people. Some 1319
cases totaled at least one million yuan (roughly $120,000); those proceedings
involved 9,452 participants – 2,700 of them county-level officials
or higher, and six at provincial or ministry levels (People’s Daily,
2002b). Party enforcement activities are even more sweeping: in 2001
Discipline Inspection committees investigated 174,633 cases, punishing
over 175,000 civilian officials including 6,076 holding county posts and
497 in prefectural agencies (People’s Daily, 2002a). The sums involved in
corrupt deals have also grown: a generation ago, bribes and embezzlements
usually amounted to a few thousand yuan or less, but now cases
involving millions are common. Overall, Pei (1999: 96) estimates that
corruption may cost China 4 percent of its GDP annually.
Changing norms and values
Not surprisingly, given economic changes and the party’s problems, China
is experiencing a crisis of values. Generations raised on egalitarian ideology
have been urged ‘‘to get rich and to get rich fast’’ (Deng, 1983, quotedin
Hao and Johnston, 2002: 589), and their children live in a country – and
increasingly, a global society – Mao might have had difficulty imagining.
Market reform began at, and may have been in part a response to, a time of
widespread disillusionment during the decade following the catastrophe of