China Daily recently reported on new compulsory ethics classes for government officials. It said, “The ethics campaign, which will be ‘of great significance’ in lifting public confidence in the government and in civil servants as well as in consolidating the Party’s governance position, will be carried out from 2011 to 2015”
Lift public confidence in government? Maybe. Consolidate the Party’s governance position? Uh, I guess…if somehow that isn’t already 100% done. Do anything to actually improve officials’ ethics? *crickets chirping*
Any economist will tell you that the only thing that changes behavior on a wide scale is incentives. I’ve written about these absurd campaigns before and how they always neglect the only two things that actually deincentivize corruption: An untied press and an independent judiciary.
So I always wonder who these campaigns are really for. Are they just a show to pacify a public increasingly aware and intolerant of corruption? Or does the Party genuinely believe that officials can be trained to act ethically without actual public oversight?
I often think the latter is possible. Though absolute power has proven to corrupt absolutely time and time again, people always think they can be the ones to break the pattern. Hell, if you put me completely in charge I bet I’d create a utopia given my benevolence and 100% correct beliefs. So maybe the higher-ups see the Party as a flawed entity which can consciously overcome its shortcomings and become the benevolent force Mao (supposedly) envisioned.
But that same China Daily piece had another quote that shed further light: “Laws overlap ethics, but the law cannot fully cover all ethical issues, such as extra marital affairs, which tend to lead officials into corruption.”
While I’m sure there are exceptions, the idea that affairs “tend to lead officials into corruption” seems completely backwards. That’s not what the Party wants people to think though. They love showing how many mistresses fallen corrupt officials had; or how frivolously they lived. It shows that their corruption is a personal level moral issue; not a nationwide systematic one.
Lai Changxing, who was responsible for the “biggest economic crime in the history of the People’s Republic of China” in a black market import racket, used to keep an extravagant mansion/brothel where he’d entertain government officials with wild sex parties. After they all fell off the horse, the mansion was turned into a museum open to the public to showcase Lai’s and the officials’ depravity. (It was later shut down after guests swarmed in and marveled at how awesome being a corrupt official is).
So this new ethics plan seems to target the alleged route of corruption in the Party’s narrative: immoral lifestyles. That’s the narrative they’ve been pushing so now they have to show they’re doing something about it. And they’ve given themselves five years to implement it – probably about as long as they can plausibly draw it out.
But the real question is if, and for how long these campaigns can actually placate the masses’ impatience with corrpution. Stay tuned…
Sinostand 