The honeycomb of corruption

The honeycomb of corruption
腐败之蜂巢

A little reform in the state sector has proved a dangerous thing
国营企业改革，牵一发而祸及全身

Apr 6th 2000 | from PRINT EDITION

"AT LEAST under Mao there was no corruption," sighed this correspondent's Beijing neighbour as he griped about the local police. Not because man lived in prelapsarian bliss, but because Mao's egalitarian state enforced poverty on all, so there was little wealth to steal. Even if someone managed to get hold of public assets, he would find it well-nigh impossible to turn them into cash. During the Cultural Revolution, it was often for possession of things like cigarettes and liquor that Red Guards persecuted "corrupt" high party officials.

"至少在毛泽东时代没有腐败现象，"本报记者的一位北京邻居在指摘当地警察时慨叹到。这并非由于那个时代的人纯洁无邪，而应归因于毛泽东建立的平等国度，人人贫穷，没有什么可偷的。即使有人可以掌控公共财产，但也无法将其转换成现金收入囊中。文化大革命期间，党的高级官员有香烟和酒都会被红卫兵纳入"腐败"之列。

Today, a puritanical drive against official corruption recalls those earlier days. Central leaders rail against the cancer of corruption and promise to excise it. Their indignation is echoed in the official media. An audit of embezzlement in the first half of 1999 which the central government published last August showed that some 20 billion yuan ($2.4 billion) had been diverted from the state into personal bank accounts. Another 1 billion yuan had been bilked from the pension funds of the state railways, post and telecommunications. About 6 billion yuan of pension funds from the state coal bureau had been misused. And so it goes on. Moreover, this is merely what the central government says it knows about, which is less than it should. The party's official mouthpiece, the People's Daily, says that 120 billion yuan of state funds were misused (on a wider definition) in the first half of last year—equivalent to one-fifth of the central government's tax revenues.

如今，对官员腐败的强烈愤慨让我们回想起过去。中央领导人严厉指责腐败风气，誓言一举铲除。他们的义愤填膺在官方媒体中广泛回响。中央政府于去年八月份公布的1999年上半年贪污审计显示，约200亿元（24亿美元）国家资产非法转入个人银行账户。另有约10亿元资金从国家铁路、邮政及电信企业的退休金中非法盗取。此外，国家煤炭局约60亿元退休金被滥用。腐败风气继续蔓延。而这仅是中央政府掌握的情况，相比实际，仅是冰山一角。据共产党官方喉舌《人民日报》报道，去年上半年国有资产约1200亿元被滥用（广义）——约达政府税收总额的五分之一。

Leaders promise to crack down on corrupt officials, but they face an impossible task. Very occasionally, a high official is executed to set an example. Coinciding with the annual meeting of the National People's Congress in early March, a former deputy governor of Jiangxi province, Hu Changqing, was tried for taking $650,000 in bribes, and shot for his crimes. He was the most senior official to be executed in half a century of Communist rule.

领导官员对打击腐败官员信誓旦旦，但同时也面临着一个难以逾越的艰巨任务。有时，高官被判处死刑，意欲杀鸡儆猴。今年三月初时值每年举行一次的全国人民代表大会，前江西省副省长胡长清被控受贿65万美元，并予以枪决。胡长清是共产党执政近半个世纪以来被判处死刑的最高级别官员。

"No matter what unit or person is involved in the case, we must investigate to the end. Our hand will not falter," said China's top judge at the time. Fine words, but are they true? The central leadership often publicises the misdeeds of low-ranking officials, who are described as "morally corrupt", as though they were suffering from a personality disorder, when the real problem is systemic rot. Yet corruption in high places is more difficult to tackle: if too much attention is drawn to it, the political system itself might be called into question.

"不管是哪个单位还是哪个人，只要牵扯其中，我们就一定调查到底。我们绝不会手软，"中国最高法官说。如此巧言可信以为真吗？中央领导常将低级官员的恶行公诸天下，把他们描述为"道德败坏"，好像这些人患有人格障碍一样，而实际上真正的问题是体制混乱。但是，解决高级别官员的腐败问题愈加困难：深究起来的话，要从政治体系自身寻找问题了。

The help-yourself economy
自助型经济

Take the giant smuggling racket in the coastal province of Fujian discovered last year, involving hundreds of government officials and goods worth perhaps $15 billion. Mr Zhu, the prime minister, is rumoured to have offered President Jiang Zemin his resignation last summer, furious that the case was not being pursued with sufficient zeal. News of the racket began to be aired in the foreign media. High officials in Beijing with Fujian connections were implicated. Yet when unsanctioned reports of the racket began to appear on the websites of some of the more adventurous mainland newspapers early this year, they were quickly slapped down.

去年，沿海省份福建省一起巨大走私活动被揭发，数百名政府官员牵连其中，走私物品价值约150亿美元。有传闻称，朱镕基总理已于去年夏天向江泽民主席提交辞呈，怒称该起案件未得到深入全面的调查。该起走私案件的相关新闻旋即在外国媒体中传扬开来。有些北京高级官员也卷入福建走私案中。然而今年年初，当有关该起走私案件的非官方报道见诸内地一些大胆的报刊时，却很快被压制。

The racket has the makings of China's biggest-ever corruption case. Some 400 investigators were dispatched to find out what was going on. Since then, silence. No doubt scores of local officials will be tried, and perhaps some of them executed. But because some high officials also had their snouts in the trough, this case needs to be handled with extreme delicacy. Business China, a sister publication of The Economist, forecasts that the party will eventually trundle out an official explanation, but in a way "least harmful to its interests".

此次走私大案成为有史以来中国最大的腐败案件。政府派出400名调查人员查清此案的来龙去脉。此后，腐败之风得到镇压。毫无疑问，大批地方官员将被提审，有些可能还会被判处死刑。但由于一些高官职位特殊，此案还需要谨慎处理。《经济学人》的姊妹报刊《商业中国》预测，共产党最终将给出一个官方解释，但会选择"对其利益伤害最小"的方式。

Deng Xiaoping once said it is inevitable that when you open the window, the flies come in. X.L. Ding, an economist writing in the excellent China Journal, published in Australia, prefers to take his analogies from bees. In pre-reform urban China, he says, the economy resembled a giant honeycomb of small, bounded cells of inward-looking activity. This structure had three main features. The first was state ownership, which kept things simple. The second was the supervision of state firms by the local government of wherever they were operating. In effect, local governments served as the guardians of national property. The third was that, in a command economy, there were few transactions between firms, and those few took the form of material allocations, rather than monetary exchange.

邓小平曾经说过，当你打开窗户时，不可能没有苍蝇趁机飞进来。经济学家丁学良（为在澳大利亚发行的著名刊物《中国期刊》撰稿）喜欢拿蜜蜂作类比。他说，改革前的中国经济好比一个巨大的蜂巢，一个个小蜂孔界限分明，秩序井然，经营各自的活动。这种结果有三大特点。第一个就是国家所有，这种方式处理事情最简单。第二个是当地政府对当地国有企业的监督。事实上，各地方政府充当守卫者的角色，保护国家财产。第三个是，在指令经济中，各企业之间的业务往来少之又少，有业务往来的也属于物质分配，而非货币交换。

All this changed with reforms that have brought great complexity to the state sector's relations, both internal and with the outside world. Once the boundaries between formerly separate cells of economic activity get blurred, the government's chain of control over its vast stock of national assets becomes paralysed. The result, says Mr Ding, is that "managers of Chinese state firms essentially have ended up capturing a sizeable portion of the widely scattered public property."

改革随即改变了一切，使国有企业的关系变得复杂起来，无论是对内还是对外。一旦这些之前各自独立的经济活动体之间的界限变得模糊，政府对国家巨额资产的控制链就会瘫痪。丁学良先生说，其结果就是"中国国有企业的管理层吞噬高度分散的巨额公共财产。"

That makes it hard to argue that 20 years of Chinese market-oriented "reforms" to the state sector have really succeeded. They started in the 1980s with the introduction of the "contract-responsibility" system that allowed enterprises to sell their goods for profit in the open market once they had fulfilled their quota under the plan. It was the cue for quantities of state goods to leave the factory by the back door, with the proceeds kept by the managers. For much of the 1990s, modern "scientific" management was praised, and managers were given more autonomy to generate profits. They were not, however, penalised for racking up losses, which remained the state's responsibility. Unscrupulous managers have been able to milk their companies' assets through shell companies and subsidiaries.

这一点很难让人信服中国20年的面向市场的"改革"对于国企而言算得上成功之举。面向市场的改革始于20世纪80年代，届时"承包责任制"也开始建立，允许企业在完成计划配额的前提下，向开放市场销售自己的产品，以获得利润。这正是大量国有产品通过后门流出工厂的祸根，整个过程都在管理层的掌控之中。到了90年代，现代"科学"管理方法得到赞扬，同时赋予管理层更多自主权创造利润。然而，他们却不必为造成的损失受责，这些损失都由国家一力承担。这样一来，寡廉鲜耻的管理者们就能通过空壳公司和附属公司榨取公司资产了。

New milking opportunities presented themselves with the Communist Party's endorsement in 1997 of a "shareholding system" that would allow small and medium-sized state firms to be turned into companies with mixed public and (sometimes majority) private ownership. Small state firms were soon being privatised at a frantic pace. Managers would often bully workers into buying shares, forming nominal "collectives" to disguise what was going on. When the central government tried to slow down the process, outside observers said China's leaders were backtracking on reform. More likely they realised, horror-struck, how easily state assets were being pilfered.

随着1997年共产党鼓励实施"股份制"，允许中小型国有企业转变成混合所有制公司（大多数为私有），新的榨取机会应运而生。小型国有企业迅速私有化。管理层常常勒令工人购买股份，形成名义上的"集体所有"，以此掩人耳目。当中央政府试图放缓改革进程时，外界观察家们又会指摘中国领导人无意将改革进行到底。可能是他们惊恐地意识到，偷窃国有资产是如此的轻而易举。

Reforms have not been as disastrous as in Russia, where the theft of state assets is an honoured pursuit; on the other hand, Russia launched a full-blown programme of privatisation, which China is wary of copying. So Chinese officials and managers have had to use more imaginative alchemy to turn state assets into private property. But whatever the method, says Mr Ding, what has been done to transform national assets into private wealth in China is little different from what Ferdinand Marcos did in the Philippines, or what ex-President Suharto's cronies did in Indonesia. That should be a warning to China's Communist rulers.

相比之下，中国的改革还没有像俄国的改革那样糟糕,在俄国,偷窃国有资产的行为是一件引以为荣的事情；另一方面，俄国全面展开私营化改革，这让中国万般谨慎，不敢轻易效仿。因此中国官员和管理者们只得绞尽脑针，充分发挥想象，将国有资产转换为私有财产。但是丁学良先生说，无论采取何种手段，这种将国有资产转换为私有财产的行径都无异于马可仕对菲律宾、甚或前总统苏哈托亲信在印度尼西亚的所作所为。这为中国共产党的执政敲响了警钟。

To be fair, it is not just because of corruption that China's shrinking state sector, now making up less than half of the economy and falling, contributes a disproportionately large and rising share of the country's problems. Even where there is no overt corruption, state ownership involves a wasteful allocation of resources. The reforms have left the state industrial sector with a mess of renegade government agencies and unco-ordinated, or unenforced, regulations. Edward Steinfeld*, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes it as "something of a Dodge City atmosphere. There are few rules, few responsibilities, strong preying on the weak, and a tremendous amount of waste."

中国国有企业不断缩水，如今只占了整个经济不到一半的份额，而且规模仍在下降。国有企业经营不利导致国家问题频频出现，愈演愈烈，但公平来说，这也不完全归罪于腐败。即使腐败气焰未见浓烈，国有制自身也存在资源分配不合理等问题。改革让国有工业企业惹祸上身，变节的政府机构大幅涌现，不协调或非强制的法规比肩继踵，迎头而来。麻省理工学院的爱德华▪斯坦菲尔德将其形容为"带有一丝道奇市的气氛。法规少、责任轻，压榨弱势群体，过度浪费"。

It would be nice to wave that magic wand, privatise everything overnight, and decree a market economy into existence. But would the change of ownership help? Or might it make matters worse in an economy with few rules? As Mr Steinfeld argues, there is little point in worrying too much about who owns an economic unit before the institution of ownership itself has been firmly established.

最好是挥舞魔法棒，一夜之间将一切都私有化，然后宣布市场经济正式建立。但改变所有制就真能力挽狂澜吗？或者说，在规定甚少的经济环境下，这样做会不会雪上加霜？正如斯坦菲尔德先生说的那样，在所有制自身的体制得以牢固建立以前，一切对经济体归谁所有的担忧都是无稽之谈。