Asking if China's less corrupt than India is comparing apples and oranges
Dake Kang
The media went wild this month when
Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index showed India, ranked 85th , as being less corrupt than China, ranked 100th , for the first time since 1996. Many celebrated.
What this discourse overlooks is how the Transparency Index is fundamentally flawed. Comparing India and China on corruption — nations with vastly different cultures and politics — is worse than comparing apples and oranges. At least apples and oranges are both fruit. The nature of 'corruption' in India and China is completely different.
China is a top-down bureaucracy, running a vast but relatively homogeneous country. India is a boisterous, factionalised democracy, with a variety of different religions, dozens of official languages, hundreds of political parties, and thousands of social groups all pulling in different directions.
The way politics operates is consequently different. China does not really have 'rule of law'. Instead, bureaucrats run things behind the scenes and the law is more a tool to get things done than an authority to be followed. Decision making is not transparent, happening in backroom negotiations and via subtle political signalling — leaving a lot of room for graft. Political factions conspire with each other; people compete for influence behind the scenes. This rarely comes into the open. Losers are quietly sidelined, or if they're particularly problematic they're violently expelled — witness China's official execution spree or the downfall of former rising political star Bo Xilai.
India is very different. Law matters far more. Politicians spar openly — their fights are splashed across newspapers and blared on television, in contrast to China clamping down on political reporting. Corruption is much easier to find in India. In China, this discussion is limited to internet rumours that are scrubbed clean by censors. In India, accusations are hurled everywhere. Everyone knows where corruption happens and who's responsible.
Unfortunately, India's overwhelmed legal system is incapable of dealing with the huge number of cases, letting lots of corrupt officials run free.
China may have a nominal legal system, but in reality corruption is dealt with by bureaucratic consensus. When leaders agree someone has to go, that someone goes — quickly. But officials often get away with corruption because the system is opaque; nobody discovers their graft. There are few open records and no real media scrutiny. That's why despite President Xi Jinping's 'Tigers and Flies' anti-corruption campaign China failed to climb the rankings. Transparency International notes, "Prosecutions in China are largely seen as efforts to clamp down on political opponents of the regime as opposed to genuine anti-corruption commitments."
In other words, though China punished over 80,000 officials for corruption in two years, a Chinese official might have been punished because of corruption — or because of a political struggle. Nobody knows for sure.
Times Of India | Blogs
