CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

166 Syndromes of Corruption
egregious offenses – economic, political, or both. Such abuses might well
attract extreme penalties in any event but the party-state, having relatively
few opportunities to win credibility for anti-corruption decrees, often seeks
the maximum demonstration effects possible.
The party: leaders in search of a following
It was the Communist Party that founded the People’s Republic and
provided such discipline and coherence as it possessed for its first thirty
years. Ideological direction, political education, and thought-reform
extended downward into work groups and neighborhoods. Since at
least the 1980s, however, the party has been beset by organizational rot.
Lü Xiaobo characterizes that process as ‘‘involution’’: the failure of the
party either to transform itself into a rationalized administrative regime or
to sustain its revolutionary strengths. Caught in that contradiction, cadres
fall back upon traditional practices and norms (Lü, 2000: 22) or just go
through the motions. Older and more personal modes of getting things
done – notably kinship and the web of ties and reciprocities known as
guanxi – resurface, at times in updated forms (Kipnis, 1997; Gold,
Gut hrie, and Wa nk, 2002 ; Ku, 2003 ; Peng, 2004) . Party le aders have
r esponded w ith per io dic d iscipline camp aig ns, but they failed to r e-ener giz
cadre commitm ents or local organizati on. A recent self-e valuation concluded
that half of the party’s rural cells were ‘‘weak’’ or ‘‘paralyzed’’;
meanwhile, the party presence within new business organizations is nearly
non-existent (Pei, 2002). Part of the problem is that the party attempts to
perform irreconcilable roles: Gong argues that ideological purity conflicts
with the practicalities of governing, particularly during an era of reform
and rapid change; the party’s need for discipline inhibits the development
of an autonomous and effective bureaucracy; and political goals conflict
with effective policy implementation. In the end party and state elites
‘‘become an elite group in itself and for itself’’ (Gong, 1994: xviii-xix, and
ch. 8) – a good working definition of Official Mogul corruption.
Corruption is just one of China’s problems, but it is a particularly
critical one – not just because of its scope, which no one knows with
any precision, but because it takes a particularly damaging form. Official
Mogul corruption is symptomatic of deeper problems that raise real
doubts about whether China, over the middle to long term, can be
governed at all. Pei (2002) suggests China may be approaching a governability
crisis in which the administrative shortcomings of a ‘‘feeble state’’
are compounded by a deteriorating party unable to deal with the changes
it has unleashed. The party-state’s response, so far, has been to avoid
political liberalization. Over the short term that strategy maintains party