Patient Brokerage and the Expansion of Corruption Network in China

Based on a database of court and media reports on investigated and prosecuted officials during Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign in China from 2012 to the present, this paper seeks to understand the role of brokers in constructing corruption networks: why is there demand for brokers in corruption? Who tend to be the brokers? How is brokerage instituted in facilitating corrupt activities? This paper finds that demand for brokerage arise when two institutional spheres are separated from each other (e.g. the private and public sphere, different political jurisdictions, levels of governments, and geographies) and there are profit-making opportunities in transferring or converting resources from one sphere to the other. Therefore, brokers tend to be those who travelled across or simultaneously span different institutional spheres. Precisely because it is usually the case that institutional separation is either historically formed or deliberately designed in the first place to discourage trespassing, it places high cost and risk on brokering endeavors. As a result, we see that in order to build trust and stabilize expectations, brokerage is instituted through a web of highly informal, personal, and private connections, and has to marshal a heavy amount of cultural resources, such as kinship (both real and fictive) and place-based identities. Because this fashion of trust building and brokerage construction requires a long-term horizon and an indeed long period of time to transpire and fruit, I dub it “patient” in its nature.

Organizationally, the main body of the paper will first of all introduce the background of the anti-corruption campaign and briefly discuss my database. It will proceed to define and identify “brokers” through tooks of social network analysis. The third part of the paper look into the activities of these identified brokers and develop a typology of who these brokers are. Five types of brokers are found: 1) officials who transferred across different bureaucratic jurisdictions, 2) military officers who transferred across different military areas, 3) private entrepreneurs who have close relationship with government officials, 4) relatives of officials, and 5) managers of State-owned enterprises in non-strategic sectors. The fourth part of the paper will investigate the differences and similarities in the ways in which these brokers build trust and transmit resources.

By studying its corruption networks, this paper also attempts to understand the political economy of the Chinese society. While the Chinese Communist Party has relied on either hierarchy or market to allocate resources and eliminate corruption opportunities, this project reveals that the tenacity of illicit brokerage and networking has testified to the economic and cultural rationality in the horizontal ways of resource transaction, for these activities were precisely to overcome bureaucratic fragmentation and reduce uncertainties in competitive market processes.