Reform has to have a driving force, otherwise vested interest will prevent it from occurring. Depending on either a few clean/up right individuals with power or legalism is doomed. Such a reform can not last. For the former individuals/cliques eventually habituate to the environment or they die. For the later, legalism favors the elites who will make the laws, enforced the laws, and create a stifling "legal" corruption that we see in the EU/USA. Ultimately entrepreneurship in the West only comes about in new areas where legal capture hasn't had time to occur. Just look at the "censorship" war, which is where battling elites use the government to hinder their competitors.
If the national government wants to get rid of corruption without killing the flexibility that corruption brings, then it needs to educate the masses to have expectations and how to go about providing the correct levels and type of pressure to allow reform. This isn't easy, and the failure to achieve this level of education in what was a highly technocratic (edit :i.e. highly technically educated) Soviet Union is what ultimately doomed that system of government. I have hopes for China's people, but I can not know the future with certainty.
I ran a small business in consulting engineering from Hong Kong for 12 years, and then an additional 8 years from Shenzhen. I never had a direct problem with corruption, not once was I solicited to offer a bribe. However, even though I paid double the going rate for office administration staff, I could not keep any over the long term because I was very strict on compliance with the law. Because so many bookkeepers/accountants, corporate secretaries, and even lawyers are use to doing shortcuts, they found it extremely frustrating and would quit after a year or so of saving up their salary. In a way the problem is people like Mr. X, so many people take the short cuts out of habit, inculcation of corruption working,(edit: sometimes sheer lazyness), etc; that there is little pressure (on mostly local) government to amend procedures to make them work. It's as if there is a need for a mass education movement to break the people out of their bad habits so that the government will correctly respond to their needs. The interfaces I had with provincial and national level government were superior to anything I've had with the USA or UK, and pretty close to Hong Kong level of service.
The old expression 山高皇帝远 cuts both ways, it creates behemoths like Foxcon, who used practice in dealing with corruption in Taiwan to skill up before moving in to China to deliver a competitive advantage that keeps out overseas competition, but it can also crush localization efforts just like the S&P500 and NASDAQ use their lobbying in Washington and Brussels to crush smaller competitors.
This is an adequate description and matches my experience. But these are only symptoms, the roots of the problem are elsewhere, in my view.
In China today politicians *want* the rule of/by/through/with law, but for self-preservation they also *need* to exercise power beyond the limitations of the law (the CCP is above and beyond the law, as any Chinese lawyer sitting the bar examn knows full-well). Therefore laws and regulations in China must be vague. Inevitably, the final clause of a regulation will contain undefined "...and other", giving the administration enormous leeway of interpreting rules & regulations, almost in whichever way it wants. As a result the subject remains in a state of "guilty-as-charged, until proven innocent". And such leeway also generates opportunity for much complained-about corruption.
When the Great Fearless Leader calls for "strict implementation of the law", he does *not* call for a stricter interpretation of the law.
Doing away with "...and other" would be an extremely bold step and would create a "balance of terror" in the relationship of rulers and subjects. As a side-effect it would also entail a higher degree of accountability in the administration. And because it would be so, actually no change is to be expected.
As regards private business, the current situation is a direct result of the reversal of previous reforms by the Decision of the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Central Committee, 10 years ago. It essentially says, that state-owned enterprise should dominate all relevant markets and lead the economy. In all fairness, this did go hand-in-hand with bold governance and management reform in China's state-owned enterprises. But 10 years on, the classic issues of state-owned enterprise anywhere in the world, not only in China, persist.
In my humble view, what is happening now in terms of private (and foreign-invested) business in China is a futile attempt to balance fundamentalist ideological postulates with the world of basic economic reality. When theory meets practise.
I think your comment is very, very precise, and to the point. But I think that’s ultimately the reform we would need. And I do believe it’s possible.
Reform has to have a driving force, otherwise vested interest will prevent it from occurring. Depending on either a few clean/up right individuals with power or legalism is doomed. Such a reform can not last. For the former individuals/cliques eventually habituate to the environment or they die. For the later, legalism favors the elites who will make the laws, enforced the laws, and create a stifling "legal" corruption that we see in the EU/USA. Ultimately entrepreneurship in the West only comes about in new areas where legal capture hasn't had time to occur. Just look at the "censorship" war, which is where battling elites use the government to hinder their competitors.
If the national government wants to get rid of corruption without killing the flexibility that corruption brings, then it needs to educate the masses to have expectations and how to go about providing the correct levels and type of pressure to allow reform. This isn't easy, and the failure to achieve this level of education in what was a highly technocratic (edit :i.e. highly technically educated) Soviet Union is what ultimately doomed that system of government. I have hopes for China's people, but I can not know the future with certainty.
I ran a small business in consulting engineering from Hong Kong for 12 years, and then an additional 8 years from Shenzhen. I never had a direct problem with corruption, not once was I solicited to offer a bribe. However, even though I paid double the going rate for office administration staff, I could not keep any over the long term because I was very strict on compliance with the law. Because so many bookkeepers/accountants, corporate secretaries, and even lawyers are use to doing shortcuts, they found it extremely frustrating and would quit after a year or so of saving up their salary. In a way the problem is people like Mr. X, so many people take the short cuts out of habit, inculcation of corruption working,(edit: sometimes sheer lazyness), etc; that there is little pressure (on mostly local) government to amend procedures to make them work. It's as if there is a need for a mass education movement to break the people out of their bad habits so that the government will correctly respond to their needs. The interfaces I had with provincial and national level government were superior to anything I've had with the USA or UK, and pretty close to Hong Kong level of service.
The old expression 山高皇帝远 cuts both ways, it creates behemoths like Foxcon, who used practice in dealing with corruption in Taiwan to skill up before moving in to China to deliver a competitive advantage that keeps out overseas competition, but it can also crush localization efforts just like the S&P500 and NASDAQ use their lobbying in Washington and Brussels to crush smaller competitors.
This is an adequate description and matches my experience. But these are only symptoms, the roots of the problem are elsewhere, in my view.
In China today politicians *want* the rule of/by/through/with law, but for self-preservation they also *need* to exercise power beyond the limitations of the law (the CCP is above and beyond the law, as any Chinese lawyer sitting the bar examn knows full-well). Therefore laws and regulations in China must be vague. Inevitably, the final clause of a regulation will contain undefined "...and other", giving the administration enormous leeway of interpreting rules & regulations, almost in whichever way it wants. As a result the subject remains in a state of "guilty-as-charged, until proven innocent". And such leeway also generates opportunity for much complained-about corruption.
When the Great Fearless Leader calls for "strict implementation of the law", he does *not* call for a stricter interpretation of the law.
Doing away with "...and other" would be an extremely bold step and would create a "balance of terror" in the relationship of rulers and subjects. As a side-effect it would also entail a higher degree of accountability in the administration. And because it would be so, actually no change is to be expected.
As regards private business, the current situation is a direct result of the reversal of previous reforms by the Decision of the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Central Committee, 10 years ago. It essentially says, that state-owned enterprise should dominate all relevant markets and lead the economy. In all fairness, this did go hand-in-hand with bold governance and management reform in China's state-owned enterprises. But 10 years on, the classic issues of state-owned enterprise anywhere in the world, not only in China, persist.
In my humble view, what is happening now in terms of private (and foreign-invested) business in China is a futile attempt to balance fundamentalist ideological postulates with the world of basic economic reality. When theory meets practise.