# Why won't the Chinese government increase salary in order to reduce political corruption?

> It just got slightly less difficult to be a clean Chinese official. State media reported on Jan. 20 that Chinese civil servants had received their first pay raise in ten years, a move that includes a 60 percent bump for President Xi Jinping and the six men who serve with him on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. The state-run China Daily said that Xi, who had been making $1,130, will now make about $1,833 per month. Salaries for the lowest level civil servants went from $101 per month to $213 per month. The paper added the move came “after government officials had been leaving their jobs because of low pay,” though it didn’t provide any figures for the alleged exodus. The average monthly wage in Beijing, where Xi serves, was $930 in 2013.
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> On social media, most seemed to think the raises were long overdue, although many questioned how meaningful the official salary numbers are since they are supplemented by perks, bonuses, and an enormous shadow economy based on graft. Popular Beijing-based blogger and commentator Wuyue Sanren asked his 1.2 million followers on micro-blogging platform Weibo if they could explain to him how so many low-paid civil servants managed to acquire cars and homes. “Maybe I didn’t see the civil servants who are out doing some part-time begging?” he asked. One Beijing entrepreneur wrote on Weibo that he was astounded more government workers weren’t leaving such poorly remunerated jobs. “My dad can raise a pig for a year and get $1,611 for it,” he wrote.

Why won't the Chinese government increase salary in order to reduce political corruption? The salary is extremely low for politicians in China, and yet a lot of officials are able to afford a car and a house suggesting that they're making money from graft, so why won't the Chinese government increase salary to reduce corruption? Is there a practical reason for them to not increase salary?

While I can't tell you for certain why this decision was made, here is what would be the line of reasoning when deciding on this subject.

Political corruption in its most common form is the conversion of temporary power into permanent power.

The idea of giving high sallaries in order to prevent corruption is that you add a base level legal power conversion (from temporary to permanent), you make it less interesting to engage in illegal forms of power conversion, and increase the consequences if they are caught, since they would be losing a more interesting job.

You are effectively paying to shift the risk reward ratio against corruption.

Other factors that contribute to corruption are:

  * How hidden can official actions be?
  * How complicated and convoluted the power structure is?
  * How much power does the politician have to affect profits?
  * What happens if the politician is caught?
  * Is the state structure even designed to prevent corruption in the first place? Or are there corruption opportunities intentionally built into the system?
  * Does the structure responsible for holding corrupt politicians accountable have any incentives to do so?



The question then becomes: is the corruption reduction that results from this salary increase worth the cost? Are there other more cost effective solutions? Is corruption reduction even the goal?

Things such as adding transparency, making the power structure and the politician's responsability clearer, increasing punishment for corrupt politicians for example arguably have no significant costs associated with them, so it should, in theory be far easier to start there.

The most likely answer, however, is a general lack of will to tackle corruption. While states generally have an incentive to avoid the image of corruption to the public, this is usually something that the general public has a really hard time evaluating, and it is usually the role of the media to inform the public about this subject.

However, since the perception of corruption can be manipulated by the media, it is usually more interesting for politicians to focus on being in the good graces of the media, coersitively or not, then actually tackling the problem.

Countries like China which have a more controlled media environment can sustain a lot more corruption, and the only thing that prevents corruption from going even higher is when the corruption starts draining so many state resources that basic services monopolized by the state start being affected and the public start having more tangible and visible things to get annoyed at.