[ap-intact] COMMENTARY: The politics of China’s anti-corruption campaign
“Probably
the single greatest consensus in the literature about corruption in
China is that the authoritarian system inevitably causes extreme
corruption and that China would be much cleaner if it became more
democratic. As the examples of the Philippines, Thailand and India show,
this is an ideological conceit. Democracies in poor countries typically
have much more crippling corruption than China, and it is rooted in the
processes of democracy. In very poor countries, there are few or no
political contributions other than bribes or candidate self-funding;
peasants can’t donate. In very poor democracies, the complexity of
democratic judicial systems makes it very difficult to convict criminals
and therefore empowers wealthy criminality. In Taiwan, a reforming
Leninist government under Chiang Ching-kuo cleaned up world-beating
corruption, but the advent of democracy under Lee Teng-hui and Chen
Shui-bian partially revived it. “