ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that much of the corruption that has occurred in rural China since the launching of reforms has resulted not from the introduction of market reforms per se, but from the incompleteness of the reforms, resulting in a system that is doubly plagued by problems attributable both to the plan and to the market. These problems reflect a system that has failed to remove all the sources of corruption inherent in the socialist planned economy while opening new opportunities for malfeasance with the addition of a partial market. The chapter provides some insights into the larger problem of corruption that has come to the fore in urban China as well as in other communist systems such as the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe. Reforms have brought about a marked change in the "necessity of evasion" encountered by rural cadres during the Maoist period.
