In 1831, the young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States. His observations became the basis for Democracy in America, his perceptive study of the young republic. Following this example, AEI's Tocqueville on China project is commissioning a series of essays to provide greater insight into and enhanced understanding of contemporary Chinese civic culture. The first paper commissioned for the project, "Corruption and Indignation," by Perry Link of Princeton University, is excerpted here. For more information, visit www.aei.org/tocqueville/.

Talk of corruption is extremely widespread in China, and one might study popular attitudes about it simply by listening to taxi drivers, barbers, or whomever one meets, paying special attention to people who have a Tocquevillian talent for inference. In addition, though, there are several kinds of materials that one can study, and I would like to introduce three of them.

Anticorruption Novels. China has a long tradition, dating from the eighteenth century, of fiction that satirizes officialdom. In the mid-1990s, during the gloom and repression that followed the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, this tradition was revived as a way of giving at least some expression to popular complaints about government. Dozens of fanfu xiaoshuo (anticorruption novels) appeared between 1995 and 2002. Some were romans à clef, telling true stories only thinly disguised. Others used imaginary plots but with sociological details that rang true--and which often were true, but stitched together in fiction. In 2002, the government clamped down on anticorruption fiction, but punchy works have continued to appear from time to time.

Although certain things just cannot be written, and others slipped in only if surrounded by layers of innocuous padding, in general one can get away with describing almost any kind of outrageous behavior so long as one implies that it is a local problem and that higher-level leaders are clean. Lurid details can still be exposed, as long as an official from the Central Discipline and Inspection Commission appears, deus ex machina, to set things right at the end. (Readers and writers have a silent pact that this is window-dressing.) Another tactic of sidestepping party censorship has been to put the most incendiary comments into the mouths of characters who are clearly classified as "bad." An author can write that the Communist Party is a private membership group and that the People's Armed Police is its band of hired thugs, describing in detail how the whole mafia-like web hangs together, as long as the character who furnishes the analysis is a hoodlum or confessed criminal.

Blogs. Amnesty International and others have estimated that there are at least thirty thousand police assigned to monitor the Internet in China. They ban the use of pseudonyms and impose collective responsibility on Internet users if anything goes wrong, thereby inducing people to police one another. They offer rewards to snitchers. But despite all this, the Internet lives on as the most intractable medium the Communist Party of China has ever faced. Bloggers play cat and mouse and can still win, putting out messages that, even if they need to be scaled back a bit, leave no doubt in readers' minds about what is being said. Sites that expose official corruption can get tens or hundreds of thousands of hits before being closed down.

Shunkouliu. These are popular sayings--often rhythmical, sometimes rhymed, and invariably satiric--that are passed around in society more or less as jokes are in the West. Official corruption is their most frequent topic by far:

Officials are addicted to money
While the people labor and sweat.
If something else counts, then it's funny
That no one's run into it yet.

Like jokes in the West, shunkouliu have no known authors. In recent years they have expanded from being a purely oral medium to text-messaging, but there, too, authorship has been anonymous. This is important in a repressive context. It means that no person can be held responsible for their content, and that fact, in turn, means that they are wonderfully free of censorship. The government bans them, but it also collects and circulates them for its "internal" purposes in order to understand what people really think. Perhaps because shunkouliu occupy such an unusual space--the only tiny corner in which one can be truly uncensored in public--they tend to be unremittingly negative. To understand popular views, one needs to place them within larger patterns.

It would be a great mistake to view the flood of complaints about corruption in today's China as adding up to pessimism. Alexis de Tocqueville would not make such a mistake. The complaints are actually a sign of hope. The most depressing situation, after all, would be one in which an ugly reality marches forward and everyone accepts it in silence. The numerous and spirited ways in which Chinese people are objecting--despite repression, risk, and sometimes their own involvement in the problems--show that popular ideas about social morality are still alive and well in China.