False Economy - Alan Beattie [123]
Ferdinand Marcos, who came to power in the Philippines in 1965, rarely had proper control over the country. Just as in Argentina, the legacy of the Spanish empire was to leave a powerful landowner clique, while the half-century of American rule that followed it left the Philippines with some semblance of representative democracy but without a strong bureaucracy to run it. In 1959 a so-called fifty-fifty agreement gave the president power to fill half the civil service posts and the House of Representatives the other half. Together with the fact that Philippine politics was dominated by a number of powerful and independently wealthy families, this was a perfect setting for disorganized corruption. After Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, the economy did in fact grow fairly well for a few years. But he never had a full grip over the country the way that Pinochet or Suharto did. He faced the perpetual threat of revolts—from a Communist insurgency and from Islamic separatist movements, not to mention from his own military.
Business executives used to complain that under Marcos, officials were not just corrupt but corrupt and incompetent: you could end up paying off dozens of them before finding one who could actually deliver what he or she promised. Marcos had a clique of cronies, just as Suharto did, but his human-resources skills were poor: he chose badly and was incapable of keeping his people in check. One of his advisers subsequently said that Marcos had intended to create a Japanese-style elite; unfortunately, he said, he "chose the wrong samurai." Some of the most prominent business empires collapsed in the turmoil of the 1980s, as the end of Marcos's rule approached, and had to be bailed out at vast public expense.
Given how damaging it can be, it is remarkable how long corruption can continue. Unless there is a crisis, a gap can endure almost indefinitely between the public discourse of an honest, neutral civil service and the private reality of a set of self-enriching bureaucrats. What starts out as a rational, if dishonest, response to an opportunity to make money often becomes hardened into a dominant culture that can last for centuries. Indeed, it can become embedded so firmly and accepted as part of the system that in one sense it ceases to become corruption and merely becomes a different set of norms about the way that a state bureaucracy operates.
Such was certainly the case with China. As we have seen, China has one of the oldest state bureaucracies in the world, and one that has traditionally held an exalted and powerful social position. The Chinese bureaucracy became a qualified profession, admission to it restricted by competitive examination, more than a millennium before most other civil services. It observed a clear distinction between the public and private spheres and expected its bureaucrats to be independent and impartial. If there is anything that provides continuity through the upheavals of Chinese history, it is the role of the bureaucracy that brought the entire concept of Chinese identity into existence, and that continues to uphold it.
Yet throughout much of the last millennium—particularly the "late imperial" period of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911)—the civil service was riddled with corruption. The Chinese imperial bureaucracy in fact provides an excellent example of how corruption can be institutionalized into a norm rather than an aberration.
At the beginning of the Ming dynasty, bureaucrats' pay was relatively generous, possibly because the