Decentralization, Decentralization And Governance: A Study On The Power Path Of Corruption Governance

Corruption means the abuse of public power for personal gains. Therefore, to curb corruption, the core issue is to prevent the abuse of public power. How to prevent the abuse of public power? The history of human political civilization over the past millennia is a history of regulating and checking public power against its alienation, which has, however, turned out to be an extremely difficult journey. The extreme difficulty lies to a great extent in the very nature of the power itself. Power is by nature mandatory, exclusive, expansive, surreptitious, acquisitive, corrosive, etc. It is due to these characteristics that the exercise of public power is prone to produce alienating results. The alienation of power is fundamentally reflected in the fact that public power of the people, by the people and for the people ends in overseeing, hurting, subjugating and even enslaving the people. Such a degeneration of the state power is all too common when it is associated innately with violence, monopoly as well as alienation, which makes regulating and checking power particularly challenging. Among the various measures taken to constrain power and tackle corruption, minimizing power concentration and separating power with checks and balance have proven to be most important weapons against corruption.Minimizing the concentration of power means that public power is viewed as a necessary evil, so that only the minimum power is transferred from the people or the civil society to any public institution in the first place. Following that, the state intervention in the market or social operations is reduced to the greatest extent. On the basis of minimizing power concentration, there should be division of power among mutually checking institutions, as "absolute power corrupts absolutely". Mere division of power among different institutions does not lead to checks and balance of power or the prevention of corruption, but it is a necessary condition, to be turned into a sufficient condition when aided by checks and balance. Of course, neither concentration nor division of power is anything absolute. To what extent power is concentrated or divided, and how power is to be concentrated or divided should be determined according to the basic political system, economic structures as well as the cultural tradition in which the power operates. To stress again, division of power is not a destination. On the contrary, it is a starting line from which efforts are made to achieve checks and balance of power, so that abuse of public power will be prevented while effective governance is ensured.In a modern democratic society, the checks on power are institutionalized and legalized formally, meaning that power relations are shaped on the rule of law. Democracies of good governance operate by such key principles as "checking power with power", "checking power with law", "checking power with morality", and "checking power with civil society", all of which are mutually complementing and reinforcing for synergy. However, in terms of logic, each preceding principle of the above ones constitutes a foundation for the next principle, producing an effect of further progression, instead of mutual limitation or exclusion.In the final analysis, any effective constraint of power must resort to a synthesis of some or all of these principles. For China at her present level of development, all these principles should be employed to combat corruption, although emphasis should be laid, first of all, on minimizing power concentration and separating power with checks and balance. A most pressing priority for China is believed to be regulating the power domain of the "top leader" of each power system, and showing "zero tolerance" for power trespassing.