How Singapore transport minister’s corruption case has put focus on high pay of ministers and recalls imperial China, where paying officials to be honest failed
- The corruption charges against Singapore’s former transport minister S. Iswaran call into question how much high pay discourages officials from taking bribes
- A Qing dynasty emperor in China raised pay to counter civil servants’ venality, but it wasn’t enough – to end it, social intolerance of corruption is needed
After years of ranking among the least corrupt countries in the world, Singapore is having to come to terms with the recent corruption charges against its former transport minister S. Iswaran.
While the combined monetary value of the favours he allegedly received (US$298,000) has been derided elsewhere as “pocket change” by regional standards, the case has once again put in glaring focus the issue of ministerial salaries in the city state.
Singapore’s political office holders are among the highest paid in the world. Why shouldn’t the salaries of the prime minister or cabinet ministers be on par with that of the chief executive officer or chief operating officer of a major corporation, the pragmatist argues, when running a country is so much more consequential than managing a company, with so much more at stake than mere profits for shareholders?
More importantly, high salaries help temper the urge to accept or demand bribes.
The counter to this argument invokes the altruism and personal sacrifice that many feel ought to be an intrinsic part of public service. Dangling an enormous remuneration package will attract the wrong kind of people into government, the idealist avers.
Besides, the perks, privileges and prestige that come with these high offices should be reward enough.
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Paying public servants higher salaries to curb corruption is not a Singaporean innovation. The Qing dynasty’s Yongzheng Emperor, who reigned from 1722 to 1735, instituted the wage model called yanglian yin, literally “silver to cultivate honesty”, in the hope of keeping his officials on the straight and narrow.
One of the enduring traits of officials in imperial China was their predilection for venality. While there were honest public servants who were held up as exemplars of probity, they were a rare species in the millennia-old Chinese bureaucracy.
For every upright official who sported “two sleeves filled with untainted wind”, there were hundreds whose hands remained firmly in the till.
The basic salary of an official in imperial China was not a lot, and in the Qing dynasty it was paltry. An official of the seventh rank, such as a district magistrate, took home 40 to 50 taels of silver a year. The highest officials of the first rank received less than four times that amount.
Based on the cost of living at the time, the salaries were only sufficient to maintain a modest lifestyle, or even a hand-to-mouth existence if the official was of low rank, and had a large household.
Whether in China or anywhere else, there was a pressure to keep up appearances, as well as the tendency to compete, or at least compare, with one’s peers.
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To that end, Chinese officials devised multiple ways to supplement their incomes: from skimming off public money, be it taxes collected from the people or funds disbursed from the central government, to accepting or even openly demanding bribes from just about everyone.
For most of China’s past, such practices were tolerated until they became too serious to ignore.
The no-nonsense Yongzheng decided to put a stop to this when he became emperor. In 1722, the first year of his reign, he introduced the yanglian yin, believing, like the Singapore policymakers two-and-a-half centuries later, that higher wages meant lower levels of corruption.
The amount of yanglian yin ranged from 10 to 100 times the basic salary of an official, but it ultimately failed to “cultivate honesty” because the culture of corruption was just too ingrained in the Chinese mindset.
As Yongzheng learned, it isn’t enough to pay an official to be honest; the entire bureaucracy and the people that it serves must also have zero tolerance for official venality.
Iswaran’s case must therefore be considered against this background – that, despite its relatively low stakes, the distaste for corruption in the larger society is sufficient for a case to be made against him.
