Do it like the Chinese!
12 Nov 2012 2:14 AM GMT
A key element of the ongoing 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress is the onus put on financial corruption at the five-yearly apex decision-making meet. The case of the now expelled secretary of Chongqing’s CCP unit, Bo Xilai, a polit bureau member to boot, on charges of amassing huge wealth and his wife’s killing of a British businessman had rocked the nation for the past few months. So it was natural that the pervasive C-word would dominate the Congress.
There is an added urgency for the party Congress to take up the issue. The leaders of China at the higher levels of the party are worried that the social stability in the country, finely poised on the basis of economic growth and a remaining, rudimentary commitment to wealth redistribution, could be lost. Thus, it could severely challenge the control of the party on the population.
There is also a view that economy can develop at a faster rate if the inefficiencies of a corrupt work force are eliminated from the system. There is even a more direct and compelling reason: that is of flight of this money from the economy to distant shores as virtually every day, there are news reports about those who flee the country with the money they have stolen.
Evidently, corruption is endemic in the exercise of wealth creation, especially when the socio-cultural milieu fosters a belief of ‘getting rich quickly.’ Be it the US, the UK or any other developed country, or developing countries like China and India, corruption is a product of a hot-house environment of competition to ‘get ahead’ be it singly, individually or collectively at a country level.
In more traditional societies, ‘cronyism’ metaphorically makes the world go round; or the mutual ‘back-scratching’ that makes wealth to concentrate in a few hands, is quite common. In China, there is even a word for it, guanxi (pronounced kwantsi in Mandarin).
Over the last 60 years when the CCP had acquired the control of the country, the ruling elite have been variously formed out of the ranks of the original revolutionaries, who had fought the Japanese and then the ‘Guomintang’ forces, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mao and Zhou. Or there are those who had survived the ravages of the Cultural Revolution with Deng.
Or as now – the current leadership taking charge at the 18th party Congress – those who are children of those survivors who had formed coalitions when as young students they were ‘sent down.’ These are those that had to mandatorily work in rural China with the peasantry, away from the well appointed universities and institutions, which they had accessed because of their parentage. These ruling elites of various stages, emanating at the top, percolated a culture right to the bottom about ‘who knows who’ and from when? The natural precipitate of this social mix was ‘corruption.’ Their commitment to the old, revolutionary China, or now to, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ remains mostly at the rhetorical level.
If one takes the case of the outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, to illustrate the above-mentioned point, the picture could become even clearer. While the story that New York Times broke about a month before the convening of the party Congress, about Wen’s family enjoying ill-gotten wealth could have been the result of pre-Congress faction feuds, but the facts of the story pervade over the party like a smelly overhang.
It is all the more ironic that Wen’s was a voice of political reform in the cautious duopoly of Hu Jintao and him. He had been advocating more people’s participation in the political processes in the country. Yet, his family was indulging in financial malpractices, not all of which could have been unknown to him.
Having said that, and putting China in the same corruption basket with India, or even the US or the UK, one detects a fundamental difference with the former. In China, there is a fear of exposure; of gaining notoriety and of being made pay for the sins. An interesting statistic would embellish this point. The National Audit Office of the Chinese government (akin to our CAG) released a report recently. In that it had stated about discovering 112 cases of ‘law violations and economic offences’ in which ‘300 officials were involved.’ The Office also found, ‘Corruption among top decision-makers was ‘a prominent problem,’ as 43 cases, or 38 per cent of all violations, involve high-profile executives.’ There is even a case of state-owned company boss, who was delivered a death sentence for an economic offence.
So, unlike India where most of the cases of malpractices go into a bottomless pit; official exposures are virtually nil to be statistically significant; and most corruption cases at high places are put under inquiry commissions that go on endlessly, in China there is more retribution. In my living memory of being a journalist of over two decades, I do not recollect any ‘boss’ to have been handed down a ‘death sentence’ for corruption. We are supposedly a ‘humane’ democracy and China is where ‘liberty’ is non-existent. What would you choose?
Pinaki Bhattacharya is a senior journalist
There is an added urgency for the party Congress to take up the issue. The leaders of China at the higher levels of the party are worried that the social stability in the country, finely poised on the basis of economic growth and a remaining, rudimentary commitment to wealth redistribution, could be lost. Thus, it could severely challenge the control of the party on the population.
There is also a view that economy can develop at a faster rate if the inefficiencies of a corrupt work force are eliminated from the system. There is even a more direct and compelling reason: that is of flight of this money from the economy to distant shores as virtually every day, there are news reports about those who flee the country with the money they have stolen.
Evidently, corruption is endemic in the exercise of wealth creation, especially when the socio-cultural milieu fosters a belief of ‘getting rich quickly.’ Be it the US, the UK or any other developed country, or developing countries like China and India, corruption is a product of a hot-house environment of competition to ‘get ahead’ be it singly, individually or collectively at a country level.
In more traditional societies, ‘cronyism’ metaphorically makes the world go round; or the mutual ‘back-scratching’ that makes wealth to concentrate in a few hands, is quite common. In China, there is even a word for it, guanxi (pronounced kwantsi in Mandarin).
Over the last 60 years when the CCP had acquired the control of the country, the ruling elite have been variously formed out of the ranks of the original revolutionaries, who had fought the Japanese and then the ‘Guomintang’ forces, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mao and Zhou. Or there are those who had survived the ravages of the Cultural Revolution with Deng.
Or as now – the current leadership taking charge at the 18th party Congress – those who are children of those survivors who had formed coalitions when as young students they were ‘sent down.’ These are those that had to mandatorily work in rural China with the peasantry, away from the well appointed universities and institutions, which they had accessed because of their parentage. These ruling elites of various stages, emanating at the top, percolated a culture right to the bottom about ‘who knows who’ and from when? The natural precipitate of this social mix was ‘corruption.’ Their commitment to the old, revolutionary China, or now to, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ remains mostly at the rhetorical level.
If one takes the case of the outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao, to illustrate the above-mentioned point, the picture could become even clearer. While the story that New York Times broke about a month before the convening of the party Congress, about Wen’s family enjoying ill-gotten wealth could have been the result of pre-Congress faction feuds, but the facts of the story pervade over the party like a smelly overhang.
It is all the more ironic that Wen’s was a voice of political reform in the cautious duopoly of Hu Jintao and him. He had been advocating more people’s participation in the political processes in the country. Yet, his family was indulging in financial malpractices, not all of which could have been unknown to him.
Having said that, and putting China in the same corruption basket with India, or even the US or the UK, one detects a fundamental difference with the former. In China, there is a fear of exposure; of gaining notoriety and of being made pay for the sins. An interesting statistic would embellish this point. The National Audit Office of the Chinese government (akin to our CAG) released a report recently. In that it had stated about discovering 112 cases of ‘law violations and economic offences’ in which ‘300 officials were involved.’ The Office also found, ‘Corruption among top decision-makers was ‘a prominent problem,’ as 43 cases, or 38 per cent of all violations, involve high-profile executives.’ There is even a case of state-owned company boss, who was delivered a death sentence for an economic offence.
So, unlike India where most of the cases of malpractices go into a bottomless pit; official exposures are virtually nil to be statistically significant; and most corruption cases at high places are put under inquiry commissions that go on endlessly, in China there is more retribution. In my living memory of being a journalist of over two decades, I do not recollect any ‘boss’ to have been handed down a ‘death sentence’ for corruption. We are supposedly a ‘humane’ democracy and China is where ‘liberty’ is non-existent. What would you choose?
Pinaki Bhattacharya is a senior journalist
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