Not just in Chongqing, corruption is pervasive, from the lowest-ranking bureaucrat to very senior officials. But the linkages among them make solutions difficult. Market reform in the countryside would send tens or hundreds of millions of people into the cities, which would aggravate unemployment. State interference in the economy at every level renders corruption inevitable, but the government is reluctant to cede more control when social unrest threatens. Reform's progress has given China tools to attack these problems.
Many officials understand what needs doing.
Private savings accounts have mushroomed, providing at least the potential to create an unemployment and pension insurance system that would relieve the state-owned enterprises of that burden. The non-state sector now produces 70 percent of the gross national product, according to think tank chief Cao Siyuan, athough it controls only 30 percent of assets. The explosion of bourgeois ambition and entrepreneurial energy is evident not just in coastal cities such as Shanghai but here in the hinterland too. Seemingly in inverse proportion to the commercial fervor, the government seeks to block political or spiritual diversity. It censors the Internet, bulldozes Christian churches, tortures Falun Gong practitioners, jails labor activists and Democracy Party leaders.