Forms and Characteristics of China's Corruption in the 1990s: Change With Continuity

Abstract

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that marketization is essential for reducing corruption, the sources of corruption are many and complex. This paper focuses on recent patterns of China's corruption to see how new and different, if not more, corruption has occurred despite the gradual shrinking of non-market elements in the economy. The further market reforms in the 1990s do not reduce corruption so much as they merely alter its characteristics. Corruption is a kind of behaviour which responds to political and economic changes and hence whose forms vary with social climates. Such a complex issue requires comprehensive treatments and it is naive to assume that a market economy alone could free China from corruption.