A Study On Corruption Of Chinese Officials From The Perspective Of Evolutionary Psychology

Since the Third Plenary Session of the18th Central Committee of the ChineseCommunist Party, our Party has set off a new round of anti-corruption climax in thewhole nation. To make new achievements on anti-corruption in the new period, weshould make up our mind in combating corruption and following the line of views onanti-corruption as well as putting people first and ensuring favorable achievements.Therefore, it is necessary to explore the psychological reasons of corruption forindividual officials so as to combat corruption while distinguishing the system causesof corruption. With the development of political psychology, it has become far morecommon to make politics research with the knowledge of political psychology. Thepaper attempts to analyze official corruption problem from the point of egoism inevolutionary psychology, and put forward some evolutionary psychological factorswhich lead to corruption problem among Chinese officials. We will thereby work outconstructive measures combating corruption in order to improve our anti-corruptionsystem and speed up the political reform in China.In this paper, the first chapter makes definition for some related concepts oncorruption and psychology of corruption and clarifies theory views of differentfactions in the field, and make analysis comprehensively on their values and weaknessof various mainstream theories. The second chapter mainly introduces theevolutionary psychology and related theoretical framework, and obtains four factorsof evolutionary psychology resulting in officials’ corruption through making acomparison between the behaviors of non-human primates and the corruption ofofficials from the perspective of egoism theory. The chapter three, with the help offactors in Chapter Two, analyzes the cases of Liu Zhijun and Luo Yaping, andacquires general reasons that give rise to Chinese officials’ corruption throughdiscussing different cases. Starting from the purpose of improving political reform,chapter four puts forward approaches for Chinese officials to prevent corruption onthe basis of previous analysis.