Democratic System and Corruption

Yang Jianli

I gave a speech at the Center for Modern China, the National University last month. At the question and answer section of the speech, I said something like this: “ introduction of a democratic system can lead to reduced corruption”. “Why?” A professor in the audience immediately challenged my conclusion. I was caught in surprise and didn’t know how to respond properly because I’d never thought of this, an obvious fact, to be controversial. Today when I read the online text of Mr. Li Cheng’s speech on the phenomena of corruption in China, hosted by the Voice of America, I realize that professor is not the only one. It seems that more efforts are really needed to handle this issue.

Let’s begin with Mr. Li Cheng’s point of view. Li Cheng believes there is not definite relation between democratic system and reduced corruption. Singapore is not a democratic country but the corruption of its government is no more serious than that of Japan’s. China under Mao Zedong’s era was the most autocratic but officials were basically clean. The first mistake Li Cheng made as a scholar of social sciences is his attempt to compare two objects, which are not comparable, to support his argument. Whether or not a democratic system can reduce corruption should be determined in the same country by comparing the states of its governmental corruption under autocratic and democratic systems. In other words, we need to compare Japanese governments under democratic and autocratic systems to determine which one is more corrupt, and likewise if we want to determine which Philippine government is more corrupt, we need to compare its two governments under different systems. We should not compare the governments of Singapore and Japan. Somebody may say: “Isn’t Philippine a democratic country? The corruption of its government is still serious”. It’s true that we can’t count on democracy can completely clear up corruption. And we can’t count on that upon introduction of democracy into a previous autocratic country, corruption can be restrained overnight to certain extent without disturbance to the society. However, we have to admit that Estreda’s corruption today is barely in parallel to Marcos’, and moreover, people can expel him out of power and bring him to court for justice, which is entirely benefited from democracy. This will produce certain threatening effect on the successors. We have sufficient reasons to believe, along with development and maturity of democracy, corruption in Philippine will be gradually lessened.

Singapore’s case is very special. The scope of the country is just like a small county or big commune in China, and premier’s austerity alone can almost get all officials under control. Singaporeans are pretty luck as well. Except his promotion of that unpopular idea, to China and elsewhere in the world, Lee Kwan Yew is essentially a self-restrained figure without indulging himself too much. However, his son directly succeeded the Minster of Defense right after returning from Harvard, and was promoted to vice premier. This can hardly be achieved if he is not the son of Lee Kwan Yew. Isn’t this the autocratic corruption of power?! I believe autocratic system will not be sustained even in the city-like small country, such as Singapore. Along with Lee Kwan Yew and his generation’s gradual disappearance from the political stage, drastic changes will occur in Singapore.

We now take a look at Mao Zedong’s era. Was Mao corrupt? Of course he is. Perhaps someone may say that Mao was a very special and isolated case. As a matter of fact, most officials of different levels at that time were replicas of Mao Zedong with different sizes.

I myself was born in a family with parents being the Party officials. Most officials I knew at my younger age were those who collected properties from ordinary people while suppressive and indulgent. Generally speaking, due to the central government’s control of media and deliberate propaganda, people believe that only local officials were corrupt and suppressive while officials somewhere else were all “model cadres”. Even within the three-year period of the “general starvation”, most Chinese simply believed it was merely their local area that was devastated by famine, with corpses spread everywhere. People in other communes were leading a prosperous Communist life. This kind of blockage of information flow and fill-up of propaganda cause many people even today to remain with an impression that the Communist bureaucrats were not corrupt at that time. In fact, based on calculation of then farmers’ incomes and bureaucrats’ actual levels of life, the disparity of the poor and rich at that time was not much different from now. What differs is two things: first, the expenditure was at low level and monologue at Mao’s era in China; the corruption of power was not demonstrated as a commodity to circulate in the market as it is today. As a matter of fact, it was not that there was no circulation of corruption. There was no market. More accurately, there was only “underground” market of power. As a professor of social sciences, Mr. Li Cheng should have read the famous book, The New Class? Djilas, the author of the book, was the vice president of Yugoslavian Communist government. He found in the 50’s that after being in power Communist Party soon became a new ruling class, which was suppressive and indulgent. It was his conscience that prompted him to write the book that shocked the world. If Chinese Communist officials were not corrupt, how come millions of Communist committees from top to bottom were all collapsed within just a couple of days upon Mao’s call at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution?

Actually one will understand why democratic system can reduce governmental corruption without much theoretic reasoning. The reason is simple. Governmental corruption is the one that benefits itself by making use of its power. But those who have these opportunities are always in minority in any societies. From the interest structure, it’s the most efficient way to reduce corruption for most, who don’t have these opportunities, to monitor those, who in minority do have the opportunities for corruption, and decide their political fate. However, to control governmental corruption, Chinese Communist authority is using a means in a reversed way, that is, it calls officials in power supervise each other. These officials found soon that the means, which benefit their interests the most, is to not supervise or even protect each other, which is called “officials protect each other”. This is not the way to solve the problem. Today Chinese people should really not ponder around any more whether or not China should go democratic. Efforts should be made on how to realize democracy in China.