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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.