http://china-crossroads.com/2009/03/04/the-plight-of-chinas-xiaojies/

While I’m not certain that the higher corruption, so to speak, is necessarily worse than in the US in particular – Halliburton in Iraq and so forth – though it’s certainly as big (something I can’t really discuss without going into whole other issues of statistics and the ongoing struggle between central and provincial power blocs) if not bigger, corruption is much more directly experienced in everyday life. To take the situation of rural peasants, imagine that you were, by law, obliged to pay 5% of your income in tax, but that every year your local town council extorted 25-40%. Or, say you’re a small business owner, imagine that every two weeks or so somebody tries to shake you down, and you have to refer them to the guy you’re already paying off, who you hope is higher up than they are. (My ex-girlfriend ran a computer education firm, and was paying off the dean of her university, the mayor of her city, and some guy high up in the labour department.) Sometimes you lose several days of business after something goes wrong – say the fire department or the hygiene department shuts you down – because you’re running around trying to find who you should be paying.

Henry, drop me a note (I’m presuming you can see my listed e-mail) with your address and I’ll try and get you a review copy.

But you also really need to read more about other countries (and in an ideal world, live in them). You can live and work and own a business in the US without engaging in active corruption. You can’t in many parts of the world (which is one part of James’ point). That isn’t to let corrupt parties in the US off the hook, but it is to suggest that the degree and kind of corruption varies with institutional system. This is something that I have done a decent amount of academic research on – I would recommend Michael Johnstone’s Syndromes of Corruption as a good first take on the literature, and also his incredibly detailed albeit not-entirely-up-to-date corruption bibliography href=”http://people.colgate.edu/mjohnston/Total%20Bib%20Fall%2005.doc” rel=”nofollow”>http://people.colgate.edu/mjohnston/Total%20Bib%20Fall%2005.doc. NB that there are some real measurement issues with the kinds of data that Transparency International etc use (it better gets at perceptions of corruption than corruption itself – but there is a lot of variation in the degree and kind of corruption, and the US simply isn’t at the races with some other countries.

If your comments strike us as stupid or irrelevant we may also delete them in the interests of keeping the conversation at a reasonable level. Likewise, commenters who routinely seek to make marginally relevant debating points may be barred to make room for those with a substantive contribution to the discussion.

A warning: your score on ‘stupid’ and ‘irrelevant’ is mounting rapidly, as is your total of ‘marginally relevant debating points.’ When you make an idiotic claim that probably isn’t (as Maurice points out above) exactly what you wanted to say, it is better, in general, to admit that you got your formulation wrong, and then to restate your claim in more precise and limited ways. Doubling up on the stupid and then redoubling again is not a good idea and it is one that we are inclined to be quite intolerant of.

James – your book sounds fascinating. Any chance of a review copy?

This is actually the game played by the regime – that the majority of dissidents were privileged pissants. Or pizi.

As for how any corruption could be much, much more than the U.S. – that is mindboggling. Since I would include TARP and the insider dealing that has led to the Fedtaking as collateral for loans who knows how much toxic waste to shore up a small elite, which easily runs to around a trillion dollars in a matter of merely five months, China must be something.

Experience of Chinese students’ political views, by the way, is essentially useless; Chinese students studying abroad are part of the most privileged classes in modern China. (Not least because a large percentage of them – this depends on the institution, of course – were too thick to get into a good Chinese university but had rich parents who arranged for them to go overseas instead. This is much more prominent at the undergraduate level, where Chinese students have an extremely high drop-out rate, than at the graduate one, of course.) Talking to overseas Chinese students (or, indeed, students in China, who are fairly privileged themselves) is a good way of gauging what the position of the elites will be in five to ten years time; it’s a useless way of finding out about the actual experience of ordinary Chinese. (I’m not holding up my own experience as first-rate on this, but I spend a fair amount of time in provincial industrial cities doing oral history work, and have friends whose work involves talking to labour activists and the such-like for modern stuff.) The Guardian and The Spectator both did particularly egregious examples of this in the last few years; the Guardian’s ‘China week’ was a fucking Potemkim joke (the kids you’re talking to have amazing English? That’s because you’re in a provincial-level specialist school specializing in languages) and good old Boris spent several dinners talking to selected students at Tsinghua and Beida – the two most elite universities – and concluded from this that ‘the Chinese’ didn’t want any of this Western rights stuff.

Mind you, even at the level of privilege, you get a lot of horrible stories. I’ve got a friend who’s studying in Australia right now, who comes from a provincial city in Shandong – about a million people or so – which is, like a lot of provincial cities, essentially controleld by a local government-cum-mafia. They chopped the legs off his uncle and left him to bleed to death on top of a building after he bid for a contract that they wanted, while his grandfather had gone to prison for ‘corruption’ for opposing the group. I don’t doubt that his grandfather was corrupt, but every provincial businessman – more or less – is* – the actual convictions are mostly motivated by being against the local power group. The reason my friend was going to Australia was so that he could work in an environment where he didn’t feel that he had to be corrupt. Another rich-ish friend had just had an uncle (note; uncle can mean anything from blood relation to family friend) imprisoned because he’d accidentally insulted a new provincial (Shaanxi, I think) governor on a booze-and-whores trip together to Hainan some years before.

Of course, there are genuine and interesting reasons why many Chinese both want a cleaner and fairer society and are opposed to the introduction of Western-style democracy and even free speech. I think those reasons are misguided, but they’re worth engaging with. But that doesn’t take away from the reality of widespread oppression and corruption, coupled, of course, with tremendous hope. On a positive note, f’instance, the rules got changed in two important ways recently; firstly, you don’t need government permission to do interviews anymore as long as the person gives their consent (though I’m dubious as to enforcement on this one) and secondly, journalists who discover local corruption are now allowed to report on it directly to high-level officials without going through the intervening levels of government.

*The actual process of doing business in the provinces is extremely similar to the interactions with gangsters explained in ‘Violent Entrepeneurs’ (about Russia in the 90s), only with bureacratic threats and local government substituted for violence and gangsters. Except, um, when you have to pay the gangsters too. I could post at this at some length but this has already become a massive comment with too many parentheses.

Well, maybe. I do not pretend to be an expert on China. I deal with a lot of Chinese students, and I have a sense of what they think, but it is all in English. And it is not at all a representative sample.

On the other hand, I’m not quite sure why your reject the orientalist thesis except that you find it irritating. The thesis would predict, I think, the recapitulation of certain tropes in Western discourse – and surely that article was full of them.

Incidentally, reading around, the petition process has an office, and, according to Tarun Khanna’s Billions of Entrepreneurs, the state grades each local government according to the number of petitions it generates – hence, the incentive to beat the peasants by local government officials, or whoever they hire in Beijing. While I don’t think this is democratic, the idea of a petitioning system in which local governments would be graded on the citizen’s satisfaction or grievances doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.