Recently I heard about some work problems an acquaintance of mine has been having. We’ll call her Mae. A few years ago Mae took the Chinese national civil service exam to get an “Iron Rice Bowl” job. When the exam was given last year, over a million people sat in to compete for just 18,000 openings. Mae beat the odds on her test and qualified for one of these positions…and quickly learned why so many strive for the seemingly ho-hum jobs.
She was assigned to be a customs official for importers. As one might guess, opportunities for corruption are plentiful. But therein lays the problem for Mae. She doesn’t want to be corrupt.
Right now she’s near the bottom of the totem pole. If she deems an import illegal and the importer gives her flak, she can just pass it off to her superiors – who can just overturn her and take the bribe themselves. But now she’s about due for promotion. The new job would force her to either put her foot down and stop illegal imports, or become an active participant in the corruption.
If she did her job honestly and stopped all the smuggling she found, there would be complications. People below her might lose their bribes and try to sabotage her career. At the same time, her higher bosses would expect her to accommodate importers they have seedy arrangements with. If she became a road block for the wrong people, it could be hazardous to her job…or even her physical safety. But at the very least, she would be hated by all her co-workers.
That’s not to say it would be a free ride if she did take the bribes though. A man who used to have her current job once went a little too far. His first year on the job he bought a car. The second year he bought a house. The third year he was in jail.
Since it currently takes the average worker about 30 years’ worth of income to buy a house in Beijing, the entry-level recent college grad’s transgressions were pretty obvious and traceable. So the takeaway for the other workers at the customs branch was to show discretion in how they spend their bribes.
Mae has pretty much decided to just sit tight in her current job and lament that she doesn’t have much of a future in customs. She’s not really afraid of getting caught taking the bribes she’d inevitably have to take. She just doesn’t want to go down the dark dirty path that getting promoted would entail.
Granted, this is just one little government branch in a huge country, but there are three wider implications this suggests. None of them are very surprising.
Firstly, corruption by those with official power isn’t just a nuisance some immoral fiends partake in. It’s the rule rather than the exception.
Secondly, harsh punishments don’t seem to stop corruption as much as they do encourage people to be quieter and more subtle about it. As long as corruption doesn’t go so far that it infuriates the commoners or embarrasses the government, it seems to be largely tolerated…and even expected.
Finally, even the smallest podunk agencies are susceptible to these Serpico re-enactments. Many of the corrupt cogs in China’s bureaucracy aren’t cunning selfish scoundrels. They’re just unconfident people that can’t stand up to peer pressure. The system has given them the choice of quietly taking a pile of cash or facing the contempt and wrath of the people they have to work with every day.
Recently Yu Zhiping, former vice-mayor of Meishan City in Sichuan, was given a 13-year prison sentence for graft. He said the first time he was offered a bribe he accepted it in order to prevent the pleading businessman offering it to him from losing face. Yu said, “An official will be sneered at as a freak if he refuses to take money.”
That quote itself has invited sneers, but it seems pretty dead on.
Sounds like the debate about what the best motive for someone to spy on their own country is. After an analysis of people who spy for ideological or idealistic reasons, it was found that these people could not be relied on since their motives would not always be in accordance with those of their controllers. Moreover, since an agent can never be sure who exactly it is they are spying for (cf. British officials who were passing information to people who they thought were South Africans, but who were in fact KGB agents), they might actually be spying for people diametrically opposed to their own motives.
The final conclusion was that the best, most committed, reliable, and motivated agents were therefore those who worked only for cold, hard cash.
In this case, your friend’s ideals are getting in the way of her doing her real job – raking businesses for bribes in a sustainable fashion. Were money her only motive, she would be much happier.
Were money her only motive, she would be much happier.
Many people who passed civil service exam are from rural area. They are desperate to change their fate and they would take bribes as much as they can. It doesn’t seem Mae is from a dirt poor family so she is not crazy about money. Bad situation for her.
its going to be a long time before guanxi isnt the norm. As long as the hands of the press is tied, corruption has free reign over all of china.
This is the one thing I wish all the people boosting China’s current political system would get their heads round. That and the fact that the people running central government all started out in small-time bureaus and local administration that was just as corrupt as those your friend worked for.
The problem of how a honest official can survive within a corrupt bureacracy is a major theme in the extant works of Tacitus. Say? Whatever happened to the Roman empire?