Global Policy Forum

Interview with Charles Stafford

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION In China the boundary between bribery and gift-giving is sometimes unclear. Corruption can also be a moral act. Such distinctions are complicated by a wealth of subtleties: the concept of the bribe has been splintered to mean many different things. In this interview Charles Stafford, a specialist in the anthropology of China and Taiwan, explores the social politics of exchange, bribery and gift-giving in China and Taiwan.

Fathom: How do notions of trust affect economic exchanges? Is there a sense in which one must do business with a friend, relation or colleague?

Charles Stafford: There is a very interesting conundrum about Chinese exchange relationships. On the one hand, there is a strong feeling that the people you really know--for example, your family or friends--are the people you can trust. That is not unique to China; it is of course a common notion around the world. At the same time, there is the problem that these are also the people from whom it is very hard to make a profit. It is seen to be somewhat immoral or wrong to actually take money away from the people with whom you are closely connected.

This creates a slightly awkward situation when it comes to doing business, because, in a sense, the people you might most like to do business with are going to be precisely the ones from whom you are least likely to want to make a profit. So in fact the approach to anonymity in business relationships is quite a complicated one, as you would expect, simply because there are some contradictions built into the morality of exchange.

Fathom: Is there a relationship between the morality of exchange and obligation in business and family morality?

Stafford: The morality of exchange and the morality of reciprocity and of mutual support is something which is said to derive from one's own experience of these moralities within family life. For example, within Chinese kinship there are very strong ideas about the obligations parents have to children, children have to parents, generations have to each other, and those are buttressed by a ritual economy of gift-giving and mutual support which extends throughout life and even into the afterlife. The ancestors are included in the reciprocity and exchange processes even after they have died. To some extent that is seen by most Chinese people to be the basic underlying morality, which people then take out with them to the bigger world.

For example, within Chinese kinship there are very strong ideas about the obligations parents have to children, children have to parents, generations have to each other, and those are buttressed by a ritual economy of gift-giving and mutual support which extends throughout life and even into the afterlife. The ancestors are included in the reciprocity and exchange processes even after they have died. To some extent that is seen by most Chinese people to be the basic underlying morality, which people then take out with them to the bigger world.

So somebody who ends up being a Taiwanese entrepreneur at age 25, flying around the world, will presumably have first grown up in a Taiwanese family where he will have learned or perhaps not have learned a kind of morality of how family relations should work.

Fathom: Can you give any examples of corruption and deception that you encountered while conducting fieldwork?

Stafford: In Taiwan, at the time of my fieldwork in the late 1980s (and this practice may have changed by now), it was very common for teachers to pay bribes to the principals of the school where they hoped to be assigned. In order to be assigned to a particular community, the teacher would have to part with money, and some form of words was used so that it didn't seem like a bribe, but effectively they would pay for the pleasure of being assigned to a particular community. This was not such an unusual practice, but, strictly speaking, that is a case of corruption.

What is interesting about that particular case is that very often the teachers who paid these bribes were doing it precisely so they could live near their elderly parents in order to take care of them as they got older and needed support. Although this was on the surface an immoral activity--that is, corruption--on another level it was precisely moral, because they were trying hard to live up to their traditional moral obligations to their parents.

Fathom: Do corruption and bribery often become intermingled with the idea of gift-giving?

Stafford: This topic has been discussed by an anthropologist called Mayfair Young, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who did an investigation into the various ways people build up connections with others, and a lot of that is to do with the ritual economy--gift-giving, banquet-giving and the cultivation of relationships which may or may not turn out to be useful relationships in the long term.

One of the obvious points to be made about this is that there are very close links between the sort of gift-giving that goes on within families or local communities and the kind of bribery that goes on with corrupt officials which would universally be seen as a bad thing. One of the points Mayfair Young makes is that people know perfectly well the difference between these, and indeed they have quite subtle distinctions for different types of bribes.

Nevertheless, there is continuity of practice. There is a fuzzy boundary between gift and bribe which to some extent allows the moral language of gift-giving to sneak its way into areas which are perhaps less moral. This leaves people with a lot of conundrums in terms of exactly how to go about their business in everyday life. That is the kind of thing we expect where the cultural way of thinking about these topics has become quite complicated.

Fathom: In the light of this, what can you say about the relationship between culture and economy?

Stafford: This is an enormous debate which has been going on for a very long time. On the one hand, you have people who feel that economic life can be defined in a very formal way, that modern market economies follow formal principles which are not subject to cultural factors. On the other hand, you have people, a lot of whom are anthropologists, who argue that markets around the world are terribly different precisely because of cultural factors, therefore it is inappropriate to imagine that these formal economic rules can apply everywhere. That is a debate that has been going on for years and no doubt will continue to go on.

My own view is that there is room in the world for both perspectives. I do not think that the Chinese economy is so unique that Western models of econometrics are not going to have any bearing on what happens there. That is an unsustainable position. On the other hand, if one is willing to pay attention to cultural subtleties and local practices you do find that this modern market global economy is not as monolithic as people tend to assume. This may be an old debate, but it is one that is likely to continue.

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