Sociocultural Aspects of Corrupt Behavior. The Experience of China

Abstract

The processes of economic liberalization and democratization have presented emerging nations with a wide range of complicated issues, the resolution of which proved to be extremely challenging due to the specifics of their socio-cultural context. One of these issues is corruption, whose great prevalence hampers the establishment and consolidation of a modern system of public administration in these countries. It has been demonstrated through experience that corruption perception in developed countries affect acceptable behavior patterns in developing countries, making it difficult to detect corruption and create effective anti-corruption measures. The article examines how sociocultural factors influence the perception of corruption with the example of the experience of modern China. In particular, various types of guanxi relations, which have been the basis of social interaction in China for many centuries, are being explored. But since the beginning of economic reform and the reorganization of the legal system, they have become ambiguous, since their content has much in common with the Western understanding of corrupt behavior, shared throughout the world, including in China. The authors come to the conclusion that it is extremely difficult to legally limit guanxi, since they are part of the cultural environment, and this allows us to attribute guanxi to “white corruption”. At the same time, situations in which guanxi relations are used as a cover for corrupt deals must be stopped. This requires not so much tough administrative measures but strengthening the value in the minds of citizens and civil servants of an orientation towards achieving national, non-group or individual interests.