'关系'、礼物和腐败 - 腐败主体的能动性和腐败交换的运作模式 (Guanxi, Gift and Corruption - The Enabling Role of Corruption Participants in Corrupt Exchange in China)

目前关于腐败的研究大多集中在从宏观上分析腐败产生的政治、经济与社会环境。本文则从微观层面上分析腐败行为，特别是：贿赂行为是如何在行贿人和受贿人的操作下进行的。在此基础上，本文特别探讨为什么“关系”在腐败交换行为中有不可替代的重要性。通过具体的实证分析，本文得出结论：贿赂行为的过程不是一些无序的分散行为的简单集合，而是遵循特定的规则和惯例。这些规则和惯例可以被视为替代市场来推动腐败进行的非正式交换机制。本文论证了“关系”以及与此相关的一系列行为正是这种非正式交换机制的具体体现。它的主要功能是：通过将腐败交换与社会交换稼接以排除妨碍腐败交易进行的法律、道德和认知障碍并将腐败参与者的交易安全风险、道德成本和认知失调最小化。目前学界通常认为：是中国的“关系”文化诱发了腐败。本文持相反观点：即，是腐败制造了“关系”文化，因为“关系”作为一种替代市场的非正式交换机制是腐败的必要组成部分。 Unlike most current academic studies on corruption in China, which focus on the theme of how the political, economic and social environments have caused corruption at the macro-level, this paper takes a micro-view. It is concentrating on the question as to how corruption, notably bribery, takes place between a briber and the bribed. Moreover, it examines what exact role guanxi-practice plays in corrupt exchange and, more importantly, why it constitutes a critical element. Through in-depth case-studies derived from extensive fieldwork, this paper comes to the conclusion that the micro-level operation of corruption in China is not due to some haphazard aggregation of sporadic acts but follows certain rules and codes of conduct, which should be seen as an informal institutional mechanism facilitating the contracting process of corrupt exchange. This paper also demonstrates that guanxi-practice embodies such rules and codes of conduct. Such conduct purports to remove the legal, moral and cognitive barriers impeding the contracting process of corrupt exchange by grafting a corrupt agreement upon a social setting, in which risk of exchange safety is controlled, and moral costs and cognitive dissonance are reduced. Therefore, this paper contends that the causality link between guanxi-practice and corruption is the inverse of the view held by many. It is not that the participants of corruption are compelled to corrupt conduct because of the existence of the guanxi-practice, but on the contrary, these participants adopt guanxi-practice as an alternative operating mechanism that facilitates corruption