A Taste for the Take

A Taste of the Take

Bribery is in the bud among officials

At the Canton Trade Fair, the bustling twice-annual bazaar for China's international commerce, a Chinese official approached a visiting European businessman with a delicate but unmistakable proposition: favored business dealings, in return for the gift of a particularly desirable stereo hi-fi system. In Tianjin (Tientsin), a factory received a special shipment from an overseas Chinese merchant with whom it regularly deals: a free new automobile. In Peking, officials of a trading corporation asked another foreigner for a specified gift, an expensive Nikon camera.

Until a few months ago, that kind of bribery and corruption would have been unthinkable in China's strictly collectivized, rigidly austere commercial system. But of late many Chinese bureaucrats and factory managers involved in foreign trade have shown themselves readily disposed to partake of the myriad goodies that can accompany avid salesmanship. Officials who once would have rejected anything more expensive than a lapel pin now eagerly accept, and often solicit, valuable gratuities--everything from sophisticated machinery and heavy vehicles for their factories, to electronic calculators, cassette tape recorders, TV sets and even limousines for themselves.

Typically, the extended palm works like this: in meetings with foreign businessmen, officials will pick an opportune moment to mention that "donations" to China's modernization effort would be welcome. What sort of donations? Well, the officials explain, our factory--or municipal bureau or provincial trading office, as the case may be--is desperately short of transportation, for instance, and a reliable car might be most appreciated. The car, either new or secondhand, is duly acquired in Hong Kong and shipped inland. Technically, it belongs to the factory; in practice, it usually becomes the private property of one or two high officials.

The automobile, especially a Mercedes-Benz, has become the most prized "donation" of all. At the Peking headquarters of a trade corporation, it was not so subtly suggested to a Western businessman that he should donate two cars, one for his own use during occasional visits to China and one for the corporation. Members of another trade corporation told representatives of a U.S. company that a particular commodity purchase did not have to be paid entirely in cash; instead, if the Americans came across with a car, the vehicle's cost could be deducted from the contracted sum.

China's piecemeal corruption pales by comparison with the systematic payoffs that are taken for granted in other Asian countries, but China watchers believe that bribery is a symptom of a general malaise that has infected the country's far-flung bureaucracy. They noticed that after Mao's death, the morale and dedication of bureaucrats seemed to be improving. Now, however, many officials appear to have reverted to skepticism and self-protective caution.

When the abrupt new liberalization of the Great Leap Outward was just as abruptly slowed down this spring, many officials drew the old and painful lesson that today's official line may be tomorrow's heresy. Says a U.S. Sinologist who has recently visited several provinces: "Chinese officials seem to have decided that things are still far too uncertain and that they've got to play it safe and look out for No. 1." To a growing minority of officials with an appetite for the good life, that means not only pressing foreigners for favors, but also siphoning off material goods for their own use, and sometimes even appropriating manpower to build private homes.

The creeping elitism is not lost on Peking's leaders, who are well aware that the average worker must wait years just to buy a bicycle and that according to reliable Chinese sources, some 200 million peasants remain in a state of "semistarvation." A recent ruling by Peking authorities reportedly put a limit of $4,000 on the value of foreign "donations." Last month the official People's Daily harshly attacked self-indulgent cadres who have illicitly built "new super-luxuriant homes" and who "practice waste and extravagance and eat and drink their fill under all sorts of pretexts at the state's expense."

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