Being from the sub-continent, low-level and bureaucratic corruption is a big pervasive problem. Corruption in general. From the lower office peons to the highest officers the rot runs deep. Bribing to even get basic paperwork done is common. How do countries like China and others in the “First World” handle it?
Is it a culture thing? or something else?
I’d strongly recommend reading State and Revolution. In it, though not exhaustive measures, Lenin talks about two pretty strong systems: Instant recall democracy, and the ability of everyone to be a ‘bureaucrat’.
The former is pretty straight forward, when elected officials are clearly acting fucky, people should have the ability to prompt an immediate recall election.
The second is a bit more revolutionary and fundamental, the idea was that a big reason officials are corrupt is because they end up in this weird “elite” bureaucrat class, where you can only replace them with people of a very limited education or background. His thrust was to ‘democratise’ qualifications, basically ensuring that huge swathes of the population have easy access to any necessary education, and to ensure that high-ranking state official positions are frequently rotated out.
The end result is that you have a lot more "average joe"s in more powerful positions, who are proficient but not part of existing corrupt networks or cultures, and are a constant breath of fresh air. Trust in the position is then built because state positions have a high participation from citizens across differing parts of society, rather than forming their own corrupt clique.
I wonder how this would work in a modern world of increasing hyperspecialization. I guess it’s probably still workable if you are able take the cuban doctors approach and just train a surplus of professionals, scientists, engineers, etc, but honestly I’m not sure you can do that for every profession all at once, at least not while having to exist in a hegemonically capitalist world.
On the other hand maybe specialization is a process which can be reversed somewhat. I do think its undesirable to have (for example) chud STEM bros who only know anything about their area of specialty, and actively denigrade other disciplines especially social sciences. Creating an education system to produce more generalists would help, and seems like a good ideological fit for a socialist society. A whole society of people where most have 4 or 6 years of post secondary education, with a focus on well-roundedness and political education is probably a lot more resilient than one where 70% of people have none, 20% have 4 years but 10% are career specialists with 10+ years in academia focused almost solely on their hyper-specialty and get exalted above the rest.
While hyperspecialisation definitely applies in STEM subjects, I’m not sure it applies in a big way to higher-level politicians and civil servant positions, which are largely just project management and high-level planning.
Interesting, seems different from China’s approach, but I may be wrong.
I don’t know loads about how either works in China. I think Lenin’s ideal form of ‘anyone can and should be a bureaucrat for some period of time’ is dependent on reaching at least some progressed stage in socialism.
I think China is moving in that direction, local democracy is already pretty participatory as I understand it. Their university enrolment rate is rocketing upwards in the past couple decades. And they only recently made a law forcing company boards to have a minimum amount of workers. So they are clearly in the process of enabling and involving more workers in high-end positions.