Corruption and the Transition from Socialism in China

Corruption has been a long-standing if intermittent focus of concern in development circles for over three decades. There has been an enormous amount of empirical research and theorizing on the phenomenon which has produced a complex accumulation of alternative explanatory frameworks, typologies of different forms of corruption, and detailed contextual studies using a wide range of different disciplinary approaches ranging from macrosociological analyses of socio-cultural processes to dyadic game-theory modelling. While the results of this tradition are impressive, they have not as yet contributed to a common paradigm of analysis which is useful both for understanding and combating corruption. Indeed, the accumulation of research has tended to make the issue seem more and more complex and immune to comparative analysis while attempts to simplify (as, for example, through the use of rent-seeking and public choice theories) have proven too blunt an instrument to be intellectually cogent or practically useful. As the World Bank admits, the causes of corruption are rooted in the political and economic conditions of each country and 'as such, its causes are as complex as the types of corruption are varied'.' Why then raise the issue yet again as a subject for serious attention? First, contrary to the expectation of some modernization theorists, pervasive political corruption may well be an entrenched element of highly industrialized societies, not an unfortunate but ultimately escapable dimension of underdevelopment. Political and bureaucratic corruption is still stubbornly entrenched in the poor countries of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, remains a consistent aspect of the developmentally successful East Asian NICS (with the exception of Singapore), and has reared its hydra-head in the post-communist 'transitional' societies of central and eastern Europe. Ariel Cohen states that 'a tidal wave of corruption is sweeping Eurasia, threatening to bury the fragile democratic institutions in Russia and other countries in the region', a tide which 'not only threatens Russia but the entire world'.2 In short, from the perspective of the 'donor' countries in the