WANG XIAOFANG

The main thing is the ‘rule of corruption’: helping the horse both to race and also to get a mouthful of hay. It’s what all civil servants are secretly thinking. Our expectations for our civil servants are far too high, far too grandiose. The pressure is more than their flesh-and-blood bodies can stand.

Bribery, he explained, is ingrained in every aspect of Chinese culture. When devotees go to worship Buddha, they don’t cleanse their souls, like Christians confessing their sins in church. They kneel down and donate money to the collection box, to bribe the Buddha.

Thousands of years of worshiping power has dealt a mortal wound to Chinese culture. That’s hypocrisy and falsehood. The habit of falsehood is fatal to a culture. But to us, falsehood is the essence.

The main thing is the ‘rule of corruption’: helping the horse both to race and also to get a mouthful of hay. It’s what all civil servants are secretly thinking. Our expectations for our civil servants are far too high, far too grandiose. The pressure is more than their flesh-and-blood bodies can stand.

Thousands of years of worshiping power has dealt a mortal wound to Chinese culture. That’s hypocrisy and falsehood. The habit of falsehood is fatal to a culture. But to us, falsehood is the essence.

Bribery, he explained, is ingrained in every aspect of Chinese culture. When devotees go to worship Buddha, they don’t cleanse their souls, like Christians confessing their sins in church. They kneel down and donate money to the collection box, to bribe the Buddha.