Why Is Corruption Demoralizing?

Everyone knows that despite all the talks about equality, we live in a two-class society: those who live above the law and everyone else.

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Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Communist China is known for many things, including corruption. It is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and corruption is the result of systemic issues and individual vices.

Corruption is systemic in China because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controls all the resources and distributions. There are no elections, an independent judicial system, or a free press. Combining one-party rule and the lack of checks-and-balances in the system has created a fertile environment for widespread corruption. 

Furthermore, corruption is inevitable in a socialist society is that socialist policies always lead to disasters, as even socialists know. For people to survive in a socialist society, subverting terrible policies or cheating is a must. Historian Robert Service wrote: “Disobedience in the Soviet Union was not so much the grit that stopped the machinery as the oil that prevented the system from grinding to a complete standstill.” 

Similarly, cheating or disobeying party policies is not only a must-have self-preservation skill under socialism but also what has sustained China’s socialist economy from collapsing. Anyone who cheats needs those around him or her, especially those who have the power to look the other way. Truth be told, those powerful people knew the party’s policies wouldn’t work, and they needed the so-called “cheaters” to break the rules in order to save the system and keep the party in power, but they would only be willing to look the other way for a price. Thus, corruption in a socialist society is unavoidable.

Corruption in China starts at the top. A recent paper on measuring corruption in China found:

“Chinese officials’ so-called ‘grey income’ amounts to 83% of their formal salary. Notably, this figure increases sharply with rank. For example, the unofficial earnings of low-level civil servants are just 27% of their official income. By contrast, for governmental division chiefs (zheng chu in Chinese administrative jargon), the ratio skyrockets to 172%. Strikingly, the off-the-books income of a director general in a government department (zheng ju) – on par with the mayor of a small or medium-size city in China’s administrative hierarchy – represents a whopping 424% of official compensation.”

Since all party members exploit their power and control of resources in exchange for bribes, every supreme leader of the party, from Chairman Mao to today’s Xi Jinping, used anti-corruption campaigns to tighten their control and purge political enemies. But the party leaders knew very well that such campaigns never addressed the root cause of corruption—the one-party rule.