China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [12]
Intriguingly, one can find some evidence of a rising discount rate in the behavior of China’s ruling elites. In Chinese press stories of officials punished for corruption, many officials openly admit that they have lost faith in communism and in the CCP, and that their corrupt actions were prompted by their fear of the future. Some high-ranking officials have even resorted to superstition to help them predict the future. Hu Changqing, a deputy governor of Jiangxi executed for corruption, reportedly told his son (who had already immigrated to North America) that “one day China will be no more ... But with two nationalities, we will have insurance.” (Hu got every member of his family false identity papers and passports.) Hu Jianxue, the party secretary of the city of Tai’an in Shandong, privately told his subordinates that “Socialism is a dead-end.”9
Li Zhen, the head of the provincial tax bureau in Hebei province who was executed in 2003 for accepting tens of millions of yuan in bribes, confessed to his interrogators:
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many former senior Soviet officials had to work as security guards and peddle pancakes on the street. I wrongly thought that, rather than losing everything once the party’s power is gone, I should start making economic preparations [accumulating wealth] when I still have power—just to be ready for the worst.
Li’s worries were shared by another official, a deputy county party secretary in an unnamed province, who said:
The disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 made me lose my faith. I thought it was hard to say whether the CCP could survive and avoid the same fate! Two months later, Deng Xiaoping’s speech on his southern tour was published, I wrongly thought that the market economy China was going to build was the same as the free economy that followed the Soviet disintegration. Free economy means freely grabbing moncy. So I used my power to grab money aggressively.10
Empirically, the rising discount rate for future gains from membership in the ruling elite is reflected in the corruption by younger officials. If the discount rate remains constant, fewer younger officials will run the risk of getting caught for corruption because they can afford to wait and, in return, will probably receive greater total returns on their political investments. Prior to the 1990s, official corruption was frequently associated with the so-called fifty-nine phenomenon (officials approaching the mandatory retirement age of sixty were more tempted to break the law). But in recent years, government statistics show that increasingly younger officials were caught for corruption. In 2002, for example, 19.3 percent of the officials prosecuted for bribery were younger than thirty-five; 29 percent of the officials prosecuted for abuse of power were younger than thirty-five. This percentage is higher than that of the CCP officials of the same age group.11 Among the top local officials and government agency chiefs (the so-called yibashou, or number-one leaders) caught for corruption in Henan province in 2003, 1,773 (or 43 percent) were ages forty to fifty, compared with 1,320 (or 32percent) in the over-fifty age group.12
These two hypotheses—rising prosperity tends to blunt the pressures for political reform but also fuels official corruption—are, in fact, consistent with the developments