Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party - Xiaobo Lu's new book offers a comprehensive, most up-to-date look at corruption in China
July
20, 2000, New York, N.Y. -- As China undergoes political and economic transition, corruption will likely continue and even worsen, according to Xiaobo Lu, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University and the author of an in-depth analysis of Chinese official corruption, titled Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party, published this month by Stanford University Press.
Due to its pervasiveness, political corruption has become a widely discussed topic in the media and in the international policy-making arena. However, there are still very few systematic studies of corruption in the communist and transitional economies, such as China, Russia and other Eastern European countries. Cadres and Corruption provides the most-up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of corruption and changes in the Chinese Communist Party. It also reveals the long history of the Communist 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, Lu argues that corruption is a reflection of political developments and the way in which the regime has evolved.
According to Lu: "Corruption plays a significant role in the current social, political and economic environment. As the Chinese political-economic system is currently undergoing fundamental transition, the state has been transformed from its main role of re-distributor to regulator. During this type of transformation, distortions such as corruption often emerge with new patterns and the amount of corruption tends to be even higher than before."
China has been rated one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International in the 1990's. Similar reports of corruption continue to come out in the Chinese and Western press. According to a New York Times article of July 2, 2000, discussing the struggle of the senior cadres with the corruption of the local communist party in Shenyang, China, there is "widespread popular disillusionment with the Communist Party over corruption and lost ideals, even among its own rank and file. And it demonstrates the erosion of the party's credibility and its monopoly on power in a country where citizens are increasingly inclined to speak their minds."
Cadres and Corruption focuses its analysis on the evolution of the Chinese Communist party and how it affected the behavior of the party members, including deviant behavior such as corruption. Lu argues that political corruption in China can be attributed to the diminished ability of the Communist Party to maintain discipline and commitment among its cadres. Lu's new book traces present-day corruption in China back to the institutional frameworks that the Communist Party established in 1949 as they rose to power. The book reveals that particularly during the radical Maoist "Great Leap Forward" in the late 50's, corruption began to spread West even though at the time the patterns of corruption were distinctively different from those today.
Lu also analyzes China's corruption in comparison with patterns of corruption in other transitional and developing economies and he finds both similarities and differences. Finally, Lu argues that by understanding the causes and patterns of corruption under the communist and transitional regimes such as China, we can better map out strategies to combat it.
Xiaobo Lu, a native of the People's Republic of China, is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a member of the East Asian Institute at Columbia University. His research interests include political economy of post-socialist transition, political corruption, and the role of bureaucracy in economic development. He has published widely on these subjects and is a co-author of the book, Danwei: Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective. He is currently working with Professor Thomas Bernstein of Columbia University on a book about Chinese farmers in the new reform era and another manuscript on the transformation of bureaucracy in the post-socialist economies. He is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations and various professional organizations including American Political Science Association and Association of Asian Studies. He has been a regular commentator on Asian-Pacific political and economic issues on CNN, PBS, BBC, NPR, and other media.
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