A Corruption Lesson from the Ming Dynasty

Have you read The Imjin War by Samuel Hawley? It’s so great. It reads like the history of a gang war in a modern city. But it really describes Japan’s Sixteenth-Century invasion of Korea and attempt to conquer China.

The state of the Eastern hemisphere then was that China was the center of the world. At the time, all of the surrounding Asian states paid tribute to China in recognition of its primacy. Japan stopped making these payments in 1549, but the Chinese Ming Dynasty never got around to punishing its vassal state for the failure. Japan’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi saw this as a sign of weakness and invaded Korea in 1592, fully expecting then to march to Beijing and beyond.

The payment failure was not the only indicator of Ming China’s weakness. Here’s what Hawley has to say about the state of its civil service:

The Hongwu emperor’s vision of a self-sufficient government bureaucracy also proved problematic. He pegged government salaries so low that officials could scarcely afford to fed themselves and their families, let alone run government offices and regional administrations. Most had no recourse but to charge “fees” for the services they provided, a practice that further ate into government revenues and inevitably led to abuses. . . .

Strictly speaking this was corruption, but it was such a necessary part of the system that most preferred not to examine the issue too closely. A few rare officials were scrupulous in refusing any sort of additional payment for their services, and lived in abject poverty; others took full advantage of their positions, and amassed incredible fortunes, while the vast majority fell somewhere in between. So where should the line be drawn? As Ray Huang has aptly described it, ‘Should a county magistrate, who by official order was entitled to an annual compensation of less than thirty ounces of silver, still be considered honest if he helped himself to 300 ounces, but not if he took 3,000? If he appropriated 5 percent of the district’s gross tax proceeds, or 10 percent? At what point was honesty defined? Of course it could not be defined.

These “fees” of course sound like grease payments or facilitation payments under the FCPA, and the same sorts of payments still exist in too many places around the developing world. It’s not a new problem! Stay safe out there and pay your civil servants appropriately so this sort of corruption won’t take root.