CORRUPTION IN ASIA

THE Thais call it gin muong (nation eating). In Chinese, it is known as tan wu (greedy impurity), in Japanese oshoku (dirty job), and to the Pakistanis, it is ooper ki admani (income from above). Every Oriental language has its own phrase for corruption--and in every tongue the words are unpleasantly familiar. All around the rim of mainland China, many Asian nations are making notable progress, but the greatest obstacle remains the furtive hand in the till, the kickback artist, the bagman, the specialist in "squeeze." Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, who has more than his share of corruption to bog him down at home, is convinced that "we must change a whole way of life. We must do it or fail to survive."

Chiseling is a part of the Asian ambiance, from the ramshackle capital of lazy little Laos to the broad boulevards of booming Bangkok and the expense-account nightclubs of prosperous Japan. Even rigid Communist disciplinarians have failed to suppress the fast-buck artist: from Red China come tales of profiteering in the communes; refugees report that shady officials do a brisk business in exit permits; and the government is constantly renewing its "Four Cleans" anticorruption campaign. As for North Viet Nam, Hanoi recently headlined a Politburo official's complaint that party members were indulging in "dubious financial situations" and "incorrect borrowing."

That could mean anything, for as any Asian can testify, the technique of the take has infinite varieties. A stranger at the airport in Vientiane should not be startled if the customs official politely demands a 100-kip "deposit" for the transistor radio in his baggage. In the Philippines, some of the busiest businessmen are the "commuters," people who travel back and forth between Manila and Hong Kong counting on bribed customs officials to let them return with luggage loaded with wristwatches, diamonds or electronic equipment. An applicant for a government contract in New Delhi may find his documents interminably lost between offices unless he helps them along with "speed money" for well-placed civil servants. In Indonesia, soldiers stop autos at gunpoint to extort fees from travelers, wander into shops to demand goods for nothing. In Thailand, the wise businessman bidding on a government contract might end his visit to a government official by letting a well-filled wallet slip to the floor and exclaiming: "Why, you've dropped your wallet with 50,000 bahts [$2,400] in it!" One foreign contractor who did just that was dumfounded when the Thai official calmly replied, "Oh, no, I dropped my wallet with 150,000 bahts in it."

Be Not Concerned

The evil of corruption, to be sure, is not peculiarly Oriental. Greed, dishonesty and bribery taint some men in every society, and in every age. Asians rightly resent any holier-than-thou attitude on the part of foreigners. They could cite the practices of the U.S.'s Bobby Baker and Adam Clayton Powell, of Sicily's Mafia or France's tax collectors. And beyond obvious knavery, more accepted forms of Western activity can raise Oriental eyebrows. One prime example, says Harvard's East Asia specialist John Fairbank, "is the U.S. oil-depletion allowance, which gives a special benefit to special-interest groups. It's legal, but is it legal corruption?"

Yet despite Western shortcomings at home, there is a difference. In the West, corruption takes ingenuity. In Asia (and to a lesser extent, in Africa and the Middle East), corruption is habitual and even traditional. The ancient Sanskrit Code of Bhraspati noted with regret the passing of the golden days when "men were strictly virtuous." In the third century B.C., the Indian sage Kautilya defined 40 different kinds of embezzlement of government funds, urged his ruler to run all his ministers through an obstacle course of temptations: "Religious allurement, monetary allurement, love allurement, and allurement under fear." Even then, Kautilya explained, it would be "impossible for a government servant not to eat up at least a bit of the king's revenue."

In ancient China, payoffs were common from the lowest rung of society to the highest. Most Asians, then and now, would be startled by the suggestion that such practices are anything more than the normal prerogatives of power. In fact, "corruption" is really only a Western word. The stern ethical injunctions against wrongdoing embedded in the Judaeo-Christian tradition are nowhere to be found in the otherworldly concepts of Asian religions. Buddhist doctrine lacks the concept of a wrathful God who punishes evil. "Be not concerned with right and wrong," said Seng Ts'an, the 6th century Buddhist patriarch. "The conflict between the two is a sickness of the mind."

To the Asians, what has counted most was not duty to nation but duty to family and friend. "The narrower loyalty always takes precedence over the wider," wrote Hindu Essayist Nirad Chaudhuri. Preference goes first to kinfolk, then to caste members, then to the district, and last to the nation. Said Lin Yutang in My Country and My People: "The minister who robs the nation to feed the family, either for the present or for the next three or four generations, is only trying to be a 'good' man of the family."

Invasions of Privacy

Family loyalty is the binding force in Asian society. In the Philippines, for example, nepotism is a way of life. And beyond blood ties, there is the compadre system, by which a parent selects as prominent a friend as he can find to serve as a sort of godfather for his child. The ideal is to find a successful personage who will lend influential aid to the child--and who will later expect reciprocal support.

The problem of Manila's mayor, Antonio Villegas, is a case in point. When it was discovered last year that the mayor's coffers contained far more pesos than seemed reasonable in the light of his income, an investigation was launched. Witnesses who had helped him out under curious circumstances were asked to explain in court. One government official admitted lending Villegas 30,000 pesos ($7,700) without interest because he was the mayor's compadre. An assistant declared he had given Villegas loans without collateral because he regarded the boss as "my own son." A wealthy Manila businessman testified that he had lent Villegas' wife 15,000 pesos because the mayor "was like a brother to me." With that, Villegas denounced the investigation as an invasion of his family's privacy. The case was dismissed on a technicality, and Villegas is still mayor.

Rampant though nepotism is, it represents only a part of the corruption that permeates the Philippines from top to bottom. Today's generation was taught to steal from those in authority as a matter of patriotic duty in the chaotic wartime years of Japanese occupation, and the habit has lingered on. Kickbacks, voting-place vandalism, judge buying and customhouse connivance are still the fashion. At a busy Manila intersection, a white-uniformed traffic cop waves through the traffic. As each passenger-laden taxi passes by, a hand shoots out and deftly deposits something in the cop's cupped fist. "Corruption?" blurts an astonished cab driver. "He needs it for his family. And if I didn't give him 50 centavos once in a while, he wouldn't let me park near the intersection waiting for passengers. He gets something. I get something. How can you call that corruption?"

In South Viet Nam, an equally permissive atmosphere has been bolstered by war and galloping inflation. Though Premier Nguyen Cao Ky's hands appear clean, the resort town of Dalat is dotted with the elaborate villas of his generals, whose modest salaries are obviously being supplemented from other sources. The squeeze runs on down into the lower echelons. One high government official pulls out a document detailing the history of a pig between a Delta farm and a Saigon slaughterhouse. The farmer gets 6,800 piasters (about $57), and truck transport is another 400. But on the 50-mile journey, the pig has to pass through seven National Police checkpoints, established to guard against Viet Cong smuggling of weapons or other war supplies. Each checker exacts a little something--enough to increase the delivered price by another $12. Padding payrolls is a favorite device for profiteers. A pacification official in Gia Dinh province, for example, was caught collecting the pay for a 59-man Revolutionary Development cadre that in fact had 42 members. Though many sidewalk stalls of black-marketeers have been closed down, Saigon still has a thriving trade in illicit Western luxury goods pilfered or bought from the huge stocks brought in by the U.S. Veterans of the Korean War are reminded of the vast theft-ridden port of Pusan. "The Koreans were really much better at this than the Vietnamese," says one.

Neighboring Thailand, where the economy is also fattening on a rich diet of U.S. cash, is happily exercising what amounts to Asia's most institutionalized system of corruption. From ancient times, Thai officials have shored up their legal income by "tax farming"--that is, by collecting a quota of cash or goods from peasants and villagers. Today, everyone is still expected to expand his salary by shrewd use of the influence of his office. The general who runs the government tourist organization, for example, serves on the board of the privately owned Siam Inter-Continental Hotel. At Udorn, where U.S. jets take off to bomb North Viet Nam, the Thai airbase commander owns the local bus line. In Korat, another center of U.S. military activity, no one can open a new nightclub without cutting in the commanding general of the Royal Thai Second Army.

Dead End

To the Thais, it is all a matter of degree. "There is a difference between corruption and privilege," explains a prominent educator. "It becomes corruption when one gets greedy and takes too much." Thus, when Premier Sarit Thanarat was alive, no one was particularly concerned about the obvious financial benefits he and his relatives were enjoying as a direct result of his position. Sarit's wife got more than her share of special favors in her silk business; hordes of cousins, uncles and in-laws controlled 15 companies that had special government concessions. But Sarit's death was followed by a certain official chagrin. For only then was it discovered that he had siphoned $29 million of public funds into his own pocket, partly to support no fewer than 100 "minor wives" (concubines). No one denied his talent in government; he had simply paid himself too much. A somewhat embarrassed government appointed a special committee to probe the estate, and, typically, its report was never published.

For all that, the Asian tendency to take graft for granted is now being recognized as a debilitating mistake. Recently, even revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej added his voice to the growing concern. "I am at a dead end to offer a solution to the corruption problem," he told a student group. He added, only half in jest: "If we solved the problem by executing people, Thailand would be left with few people."

Other Asian countries share the same growing anxiety, which, in large part, reflects their contact with Western ethics. Once it was almost patriotic to steal from a colonial government, but that excuse is now gone. What is left is colonial teaching about the evils of corruption--and almost daily reminders that by bribery and graft, onetime colonial subjects are now harming only themselves. Not long ago, the Malaysian government organized an "Honesty Month" to instill a sense of duty among civil servants; after a series of lectures, things improved considerably. Some campaigns are notably less successful. When the privilege-ridden little government of Laos established an "economic police force," its members were soon demanding a cut from the very businessmen they were supposed to investigate. "They are economic parasites," fumed one Vientiane merchant. "It is one bit of bribery that I really object to paying."

In Japan, last year's "Black Mist" scandals, involving several Cabinet ministers, stirred such a public outcry that Premier Eisaku Sato felt it necessary, in his speech at the opening of the 53rd Diet session last December, to promise to "regain the confidence of the people" with "rigid investigations." In India, the national government was similarly goaded into commissioning a retired Supreme Court justice to investigate charges that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed had vastly enriched himself and his family in his 16-year tenure as deputy prime minister, then prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Last month, after two years of hearings, the judge found that Bakshi had indeed been guilty of abusing his power, pointing out that the assets of the entire Bakshi family, which amounted to roughly $1,300 when he took office in 1947, had risen to about $2,000,000 when he resigned in 1963. But the judge's verdict was Asiatically restrained. Most of the money was not acquired by Bakshi himself, he noted, but by some 40 relatives, including his two wives, son and daughter, four brothers, cousins, in-laws and sons of in-laws, and derived "from what one might term natural advantages which those connected by ties of relationship or friendship with those in high office enjoy."

Baleful Light

Like all problems these days, the problem of corruption seems to fall under a particularly baleful light in South Viet Nam, with the critics more critical and the actors more selfconscious. Two weeks ago, General Nguyen Van Thieu signed a decree calling for death by hanging of any military or governmental employee caught taking bribes, abusing his office or stealing public funds. And he and Strongman Nguyen Cao Ky pledged an all-out attack on corruption if the voters keep the military government in office. Critics dismissed this as an election gimmick. But even Ky's civilian rivals conceded that corruption is a problem almost beyond politics. A recent military investigation ordered by Ky petered out after the fingering of a handful of junior officers. The highest-ranking officer accused, a colonel charged with accepting bribes from recruits who wanted to be excused from service, was merely demoted one rank and briefly placed under house arrest. "It is the system," sighed one official, "and it isn't going to be changed no matter who is elected and no matter what Ky says. It goes back to the mandarins. It will take a long, long time. To clean it up, we rely on the provincial authorities, and if they have a vested interest in it, then why are they going to stop it?"

Thus, for all the efforts of Asian leaders, it is likely that the odor of Asian corruption will linger for some time to come, though perhaps not with the ripe impact achieved by an independent legislator in South Korea's National Assembly, when he dumped a can of human excrement over a row of Cabinet ministers he accused of letting smugglers operate in the country. Progress is needed on every front--social, economic, political. Education is an imperative, for a well-informed electorate will hold to closer account the officials of a democratic government. And opposition parties must be encouraged so that voters will have a meaningful alternative to an administration corrupted by long years of uncontested rule. Better communications will bring the fire of a crusading press to distant villages, and the ire of distant villages to bear on the people in power. Increased contacts with the rest of the world should help to develop greater understanding of the techniques of government and business competition; and this, in turn, would encourage the confidence of Western leaders and international agencies, tired of seeing their aid money siphoned off into illicit channels.

This process has already begun. For Asians are acquiring a taste for the material advantages of Western life and developing a respect for the benefits of free enterprise. And along with this taste and this respect, they are beginning to realize that the old ways, which they call traditional but the West calls corrupt, are simply not good business.

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