Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
stability in China. Several potential challenges to this stability exist,
including corruption, turmoil in the countryside, religious move-
ments, human rights abuses, and the free flow of information.
A. Corruption
In his now-classic The Coming Collapse of China, an apocalyptic vision
of China's political and economic future published in 2001, Gordon
Chang argued that China will someday go the way of the Soviet
Union, collapsing and disintegrating into several smaller countries.
This will be, Chang argues, because of the ineptitude and corruption
of the Chinese Communist Party; the weakness of China's banking
system, which will one day endanger the savings of ordinary, thrifty
Chinese; and China's raucous and traumatic adjustment to the global
trading system. One overheated chapter in his topic is entitled “Lake
of Gasoline: The Discontent of the People is Explosive,” and in it
Change even declares that into this lake one individual “in some small
town, or large city, will have only to throw a match” (Chang 2001, 44).
As of this writing (2011), Chang's dire predictions about China's
future have not materialized. But this certainly does not mean that cor-
ruption in China has gone away or is now less of a problem. On the
contrary. Public perception in China still holds corruption as China's
most pressing problem. The Berlin-based nongovernmental organiza-
tion Transparency International compiles an international Corruption
Perceptions Index, and from 2001 through 2006 this ranked China
among the most corrupt one-third of the nations of the Earth. A recent
audit in China found that from 1996 through 2005, fully 8 percent of
public funds in China were improperly appropriated or spent.
According to Minxin Pei, Director of the China Program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “We can suppose that
10 percent of government spending, contracts, and transactions is
used as kickbacks and bribes or is simply stolen” (Pei 2007, 2).
Corruption is an especially big problem in land transactions and
infrastructural projects:
Half of provincial transport chiefs in China have been sentenced to jail
terms (some have even been executed) for corruption. Corruption is also
widespread in the acquisition and transfer of land. Typically, local offi-
cials use illegal (and sometimes violent) means to acquire farmland at
low prices and later sell the user rights of the land to developers in
exchange for bribes.
According to the head of the Regulatory
Enforcement Bureau at the Ministry of Land Resources, the government
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