False Economy - Alan Beattie [124]
In other words, it was simply not possible to exist without exacting private payments. Bureaucrats extorted fees for carrying out the most routine of administrative tasks; they sold public offices and licenses for money; they demanded illicit land taxes; they paid and received bribes (huilu) that were flatly illegal but could easily be described simply as gifts. And they passed the proceeds up the bureaucratic pyramid in what became a permanent system of routine extortion.
Those who tried to live without doing so were regarded as merely eccentric. One such was Hai Rui, an official in Jianguan province in the sixteenth century. Accounts of the time show that his self-denial, which included eating meat just once a month, became famous. Although he lived in what was then the wealthiest, politically best-connected, and fiscally messiest province of all, he declined to exploit the opportunities for graft that were presented to him, refusing to levy a large number of fees that were technically illegal but had become custom and practice. This merely irritated his fellow bureaucrats, and he is portrayed in the accounts of the period as a pious and provocative troublemaker, not a brave man of principle.
His own description of the provincial officials' triennial trips to the imperial capital to pay off their superiors drip with scorn. "When the time has come, the provincial officials load their carts with the silks and money they will present to the officials in the capital," he wrote. "From top to bottom everyone profits, and those who suffer from it are the people."
The logical thing to do, of course, would have been to regularize the side payments or increase bureaucrats' official pay. But that would have meant raising taxes. It was too much, apparently, to give up the widely held ideal of an ascetic, devoted bureaucracy. Instead, the system carried on in a state of organized hypocrisy.
So how does a tolerance of norms change? When does the way things have always been done start becoming the way of the past? Often it is when a regime or a system has failed to deliver what it was supposed to. People will put up with corruption as long as it works. Indeed, they may simultaneously recognize that such behavior is at odds with the stated principles of government, yet shrug and tolerate it indefinitely. But they will still often continue to recognize that there is a gap between the principles and the practice, especially if they can observe that such a gap is much smaller in other countries. And when the system fails to deliver, that gap can rapidly become unsupportable.
This is certainly true in the case of Indonesia's Suharto. He had long faced down demands for more honesty and openness by delivering enough growth and stability to satisfy all but a minority of voluble democracy enthusiasts and other malcontents.
But in 1997, East Asia was swept by a financial crisis that started with the collapse of the Thai currency and rapidly spread, like a virulent disease, to South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and beyond. Crony capitalism got a lot of blame for having created the conditions that led to the crisis. In particular, corrupt and opaque policymaking cliques in many of the region's countries let problems mount up in state-supported companies with state-guaranteed debt that did not come to light until it reached crisis point.
Suharto's virtues suddenly became vices. The collapse of Indonesia's currency and the economic implosion that followed severely diminished his personal authority