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Something I think most Westerners who in liberal democracies don't understand is that the notion of "corruption" doesn't really exist in the rest of the world. At least not in the sense of being an immoral deviation from the norm. What we think of as "corruption" would be better be termed "patronage", and it is the natural and default mode of political behaviour for human beings. It is impersonal, merit and market based systems that are the aberration, historically speaking. And, in the absence of strong institutions preventing it, societies inevitably revert to being patronage-based. For example, imagine you are interviewing two people for a job. One is an extremely well-qualified and capable stranger. The other is a mediocre candidate, but is the son of a friend of your uncle. Who do you give the job to? For many people in the world, the idea that you would even consider not giving the job to the son of your uncle's friend is heresy. And they would not consider that attitude in any sense immoral or improper. Indeed, being in a position to help yourself and your acquaintances, and instead choosing to assist a stranger would instead be the perverse choice. In a wider sense, within patrimonial societies there is never any question of ending patronage altogether. Instead, elite patronage networks compete with each other, and "anti-corruption" drives are about the dominant patronage-network cementing power and punishing another. We often see this in countries where every change in the government is accompanied by the prosecution of the old leaders for corruption by the new, only for the new themselves to be prosecuted a few years later upon leaving office. Xi's efforts might be presented as being "anti-corruption" in nature, but they are very much about securing the position of himself and his patronage network. If he was serious about stopping corruption altogether, he would be concentrating on reforming China's institutions to make them more transparent, more merit-based and less susceptible to centralised political control. Instead, he's removing obstacles to himself and his patrons remaining in power indefinitely. |