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PARTISAN REVIEW
to urban ones had reduced overall inequality. But changing relations among
economic sectors, and new displays of wealth, made people feel inequality
acutely.
The sense of economic injustice merged with complaints of corruption–
in
several senses. First, there was the radical extension and transformation of
the traditional reliance on guanxi or connections. Here the issue was not just
that people relied on connections more, but that these connections were being
reduced to cash transactions.
It
had always been easier to get an airline
ticket, for instance, if you knew someone with a relative in the airline's office.
Now people claimed that seats were being held back by strategically placed
clerks so that their relatives could act as brokers. Moreover, the payment
was cash on the spot, not the expectation that the favor would be returned
(perhaps to one's kin, not one's self) or the satisfaction of not being a debtor in
this system of cultural credit. The traditional idea of connections was giving
way to simple bribery. By far the most frequent version of guanxi was the
placement of high party officials' children in the most desirable jobs. It seemed
no accident that both Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng had sons working as execu–
tives on Hainan Island, one of the new enterprise zones; nearly everyone
assumed that these young men had good jobs thanks to their fathers but im–
punity from prosecution as they skimmed money from local ventures.
But corruption also involved much larger transactions.
It
was practiced
by official units as well as private businessmen.
It
involved a variety of un–
der the table
quid
pro
quos-padded payrolls, attempted price manipulations,
toleration of inferior quality concrete in return for a bribe, demanding foreign
exchange certificates for work which should have been paid in domestic cur–
rency. It is hard
to
know if its extent was unusually high, though everyone
seemed sure that it had grown. The high proportion of government busi–
nesses made it likely that such shady antics would be seen as official corrup–
tion rather than simply the result ofcapitalist innovation.
The government's economic role also produced the third sort of
corruption, a kind of semi-benign version of the second : reducing but not
eliminating detailed central economic planning created a variety of imbal–
ances. Vital goods might be
in
short supply
in
one region while another had an
excess, but either documents or cash for transactions was lacking. A number
of businessmen moved into the breach as black market deal makers, fixers
who helped overcome the contradictions of the system. They might organize
a barter arrangement which linked three regions each with too much of
something another wanted. They might arrange the sale of goods at a price
triple the official one, with only the controlled price reported. Though people
resented the fortunes made in this way, this was not the sort of corruption on
which they focused. They did , however, tend to see the whole mercantile
