There
Make no mistake, this present corruption is not caused by the Chinese reforms,
it is nothing new, it is just being expressed differently, namely in money.
In Mao Tse Tung's times corruption was expressed entirely in privilege.
were two kinds of people in China, the Cadres and everybody else. As a Cadre
you were, and still are to a certain extent, above the law. You couldn't be
fired, you had better living quarters, you had better transport facilities,
your children were better educated, and if they or you broke the law it was
easy to fix so that there wouldn't be any punishment for them or you. I
believe that Mao was aware of this and that this was one of the reasons why he
started his Cultural Revolution, but it was, paradoxically, the Cultural
Revolution that made that type of corruption even worse. It is a moral
corruption which is, in fact, present in all the Communist countries, and the
problem Deng Xiao Ping tried to tackle is now facing Gorbachev. So whereas
before the economic reforms in China all such corruption was expressed in
kind, it is now expressed in money. I don't think it is any worse now than it
was ten or fifteen years ago, but it is also not any better which seems to
indicate (and this is really where I am putting my foot in) that possibly the
political will at the top in China is not as strong as it should be when it
comes to eradicating this corruption.
It is understandable that this problem, which is really a labour of Sysiphus,
can blunt anyone's political will. It took us more than ten years to tackle
the problem in Hong Kong and we haven't really eliminated it and Hong Kong is
a small city. The problem exists all over the world, especially in this part
of Asia, in the Philippines, Indonesia, etc.. It exists in the United States,
in Australia, in the United Kingdom. It is almost impossible to eliminate it,
but it is possible to control it, and so far China obviously is not
controlling it.
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