Communist and Post-Communist Studies 35 (2002) 85–103 www.elsevier.com/locate/postcomstud Dangerous collusion: corruption as a collective venture in contemporary China Ting Gong * Department of Political Science, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, NJ 07430, USA Abstract Echoing changing social environments, corruption has grown in sophistication and com- plexity. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of collective corruption. Collective corruption, a distinctive form of social interaction among people dominated by individual calculations and unorganized interests, takes place when collaboration becomes a powerful, necessary weapon in pursuing private gains. The danger of collusion in corrupt ventures is that as corruption gets well planned and skillfully coordinated in its collective form, it may become less forthright and therefore more difficult to detect, or more overt and increasingly legitimized as an appro- priate form of economic intercourse.  2002 The Regents of the University of California. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. The term corruption tends to carry with it an image of secrecy and furtiveness that entails the involvement of the least possible number of individuals. Corruption, on the whole, is a clandestine exchange due to its illegal nature. Corruption takes place, for example, when a financial officer embezzles public funds for personal use, a school principal arranges “back-door” admissions for his relatives or friends, or a government official accepts bribes from his subordinates in exchange for favourable treatment. These practices are either conducted by a single person who seeks to enrich him/herself in an individualized manner or occur between two parties where a patron (usually an official) grants his/her client (whoever is willing and able to pay for it) desired preferential treatment in exchange for goods or services. Corruption, in reality, is more complex than its heuristically useful definition. Echoing changing social environments, corruption grows in sophistication and com- * Tel.: +1-201-684-7426; fax: +1-201-684-7973. E-mail address: tgong@yahoo.com (T. Gong). 0967-067X/02/$ - see front matter  2002 The Regents of the University of California. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0967-067X(01)00026-5