Is Chongqing building a new model economy?
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Chongqing's gang-crushing operation has shocked the nation as many top officials from the city's police departments, courts and procuratorates were arrested and convicted of accepting bribes from gangs to shield them from the law. |
I insisted that you can hardly pick up a Chinese newspaper today without reading of a new corruption case. But Cui was adamant that the impression of near-universal corruption is misleading – a product, he says, of "relative openness. And of course the media focus on this."
"As an intellectual I become more and more respectful of [officials] because they are really doing hard work and key work for the development of China."
Laws and regulations have failed to keep pace with China's development, and sometimes it is necessary to bend the rules to achieve success.
"Some good things cannot be made public, not only scandals. It's not possible to have successful development if you 100 percent stick to the regulations."
Marx is misleading
I asked Professor Cui whether he saw the wave of strikes that broke out in China's car components industry in 2010 as a positive development.
"These things are good. The labor law gave the workers the right to organize. But there is so much bureaucratic inertia. Even if this law exists only on paper it's a good thing for workers to have self-organization to protect their rights."
But I had the impression that Professor Cui saw action by the workers as, at best, an adjunct to official action. Perhaps a catalyst needed from time to time to shock the bureaucracy into action.
"In times of high uncertainty and very rapid development, the people do not know what their interests are. And that's another reason why I increasingly dislike Marxism. Marxism assumes people know their own interests, their class interests."
I began to feel that Professor Cui belonged in a Chinese tradition of rule by educated officials, but also a Western tradition of managerial socialism that can be traced back to the technocratic and paternalistic communities envisaged by Saint-Simon and Robert Owen.
Marx would call him a utopian socialist, I suggested.
''Of course, of course; Marx is very misleading I think.''
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