Corruption in China - Public Perceptions

Public Perceptions

Opinion surveys of Party officials and Chinese citizens over recent years set identify corruption as one of the public's top concerns. Every year researchers at the Central Party School, the CCP organ that trains senior and midlevel officials, survey over 100 officials at the school. Between 1999 to 2004 respondents ranked corruption as either the most serious or second most serious social problem. Similarly, in late 2006 the State Council’s Development Research Center asked 4,586 business executives (87 percent in nonstate firms) to rate their local officials in terms of integrity. Almost one-quarter said that their local officials were “bad”; 12 percent said they were “very bad.”

In a commercial environment, corruption may be prevalent because many employees aren't loyal to their employers, seeing themselves as "free-agent entrepreneurs" first and foremost. They use their employers as a way to make money, both for themselves and for their "guanxi social-circle network." The imperative of maintaining this social circle of benefits is seen as a primary goal for many involved in corruption.

Official corruption is among the populace's greatest gripes against the regime. One folk saying vividly illustrates how the public sees the issue, according to Yan Sun: "If the Party executes every official for corruption, it will overdo a little; but if the Party executes every other official for corruption, it cannot go wrong." In contemporary China, bribe taking has become so entrenched that one party secretary in a poor county received repeated death threats for rejecting over 600,000 Renminbi in bribes during his tenure. In 1994 in another area officially designated "impoverished," a delegation of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization arrived for a conference on development, but upon seeing rows of imported luxury cars outside the conference site asked the local officials "Are you really poor?" A rare online opinion poll in 2010 by the People’s Daily found that 91% of respondents believe all rich families in China have political backgrounds.