Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist PartyThe most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of corruption and change in the Chinese Communist Party, "Cadres and Corruption" reveals the long history of the party's inability to maintain a corps of committed and disciplined cadres. Contrary to popular understanding of China's pervasive corruption as an administrative or ethical problem, the author argues that corruption is a reflection of political developments and the manner in which the regime has evolved. Based on a wide range of previously unpublished documentary material and extensive interviews conducted by the author, the book adopts a new approach to studying political corruption by focusing on organizational change within the ruling party. In so doing, it offers a fresh perspective on the causes and changing patterns of official corruption in China and on the nature of the Chinese Communist regime. By inquiring into the developmental trajectory of the party's organization and its cadres since it came to power in 1949, the author argues that corruption among Communist cadres is not a phenomenon of the post-Mao reform period, nor is it caused by purely economic incentives in the emerging marketplace. Rather, it is the result of a long process of what he calls organizational involution that began as the Communist party-state embarked on the path of Maoist "continuous revolution." In this process, the Chinese Communist Party gradually lost its ability to sustain officialdom with either the Leninist-cadre or the Weberian-bureaucratic mode of integration. Instead, the party unintentionally created a neotraditional ethos, mode of operation, and set of authority relations among its cadres that have fostered official corruption. |
Contents
The Beginning of Involution | 73 |
Political Mobilization and the Cadres | 114 |
The PostMao Reforms and the Transformation of Cadres | 154 |
The Economic Transition and Cadre Corruption | 190 |
Conclusion | 228 |
Notes | 259 |
Bibliography | 315 |
Glossary | 349 |
Other editions - View all
Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese ... Xiaobo Lu No preview available - 2000 |
Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese ... Xiaobo Lü No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
administrative agents anti-corruption campaign behavior Beijing Bo Yibo bribery bureau bureaucratic cadres CCP Central Committee CCP leadership China cials clan Communist regimes Cultural Revolution danwei Deng Xiaoping disciplinary discipline economic elite Five Anti Four Cleanup fubai funds ganbu government agencies graft guanxi Hebei Heilongjiang Huang Ibid informal institutions involution involved jiancha jingji Jowitt leaders Leap Forward lianzheng Liu Shaoqi Mao Zedong Maoist ment mobilization modes neotraditionalism offi official deviance officialdom organizational involution party committee party organization party secretary party/state patterns peasants People's percent period personnel pingbi policies political Political Corruption post-Mao practice problem production province public units rank reforms renmin chubanshe rent-seeking revolutionary RMRB rules ruption rural sector Shanxi shehui social socialist society Soviet Three Anti Three Anti Campaign tion University Press urban village Wang yuan Zhang zhidu Zhongguo gongchandang Zhou Enlai zouhoumen
Popular passages
Page 9 - Corruption is behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of privateregarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence.
Page 108 - ... required that will take account of the organization's distinctive character, including present and prospective capabilities, as well as the requirements of playing a desired role in a particular industrial or commercial context. Utopian wishful-thinking enters when men who purport to be institutional leaders attempt to rely on overgeneralized purposes to guide their decisions. But when guides are unrealistic, yet decisions must be made, more realistic but uncontrolled criteria will somehow fill...
Page 9 - A corrupt civil servant', writes Jacob van Klaveren, 'regards his public office as a business, the income of which he will . . . seek to maximize.' The office then becomes a 'maximizing unit'.
Page 290 - ... of the proletariat in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the triumph of socialism over capitalism. The ultimate aim of the Party is the realization of communism. The Communist Party of China is composed of the advanced elements of the proletariat; it is a vigorous vanguard organization leading the proletariat and the revolutionary masses in the fight against the class enemy.
Page 17 - Corruption involves a shift from a mandatory pricing model to a free-market model. The centralized allocative mechanism, which is the ideal of modern bureaucracy, may break down in the face of serious disequilibrium between supply and demand. Clients may decide that it is worthwhile to risk the known sanctions and pay the higher costs in order to be assured of receiving the desired benefits. When this happens bureaucracy ceases to be patterned af ter the mandatory market and takes on characteristics...
Page 256 - Here there is subversion of the goals and activities of the bureaucracy in the interests of different groups with which it is in close interaction (clients, patrons, interested parties). In debureaucratization the specific characteristics of the bureaucracy in terms both of its autonomy and its specific rules and goals are minimized, even up to the point where its very functions and activities are taken over by other groups or organizations.
Page 60 - Here, the five targets were bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts, and stealing state economic information.
Page 10 - ... the intentional misperformance or neglect of a recognized duty, or the unwarranted exercise of power, with the motive of gaining * some advantage more or less directly personal.
Page 8 - ... is by monetary or other rewards not legally provided for, induced to take actions which favor whoever provides the rewards and thereby does damage to the public and its interests.
Page 107 - Opportunism is the pursuit of immediate, short-run advantages in a way inadequately controlled by considerations of principle and ultimate consequence. To take advantage of opportunities is to show that one is alive, but institutions no less than persons must look to the long-run effects of present advantage. In speaking of the "long run" we have in mind not time as such but how change affects personal or institutional identity.
References to this book
Organizing Through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System Fei-Ling Wang No preview available - 2005 |
China and Globalization: The Social, Economic and Political Transformation ... Doug Guthrie No preview available - 2009 |