Workers of the world, . . . disjoint!

China has been racked by waves of peasant revolts over the last two years. The ostensible reason is "anger over land confiscations in which, farmers allege, village or county officials took money from business developers in return for favorable deals."

Beijing has responded with a concerted effort to crack down on corruption in China. The Washington Post Online offers this explanation of the situation:

As China moves from socialism toward a market economy, local party officials have adopted economic growth as their main goal, creating a de facto alliance with private businessmen. In the shared race for profits, opportunities for corruption have become numerous.

I actually don't think the Washington Post is wrong here. Except to call the situation a "shared race for profits." When a bureaucrat profits, it's by definition exploitative. When a businessman profits, it's because somebody bought his product.

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All this brings out mixed feelings for me. Of course, corruption is also one of the principle things that Eastern Europeans complain about as their governments transitioned from socialist to free-market economies. Is this corruption unavoidable? Is it simply true that every time the state handles privatization and is moving from a situation of total to one of limited power that bureaucrats will consume huge amounts of the surplus on their own ends?

The sickest thing about situations of retreating government power (e.g. privatizations) is that the government runs them. And yet the resultant bumbling, corruption, and inefficiencies often breed as much resentment of capitalism as the government-run system did of the government.

Witness the World Socialist Web Site's claims that the peasant revolts are a result of "Beijing’s free market policies," which are "opening up deep social fissures and provoking social unrest."