OK I'll have a go, and sorry for the long post.
Take guanxi, the Chinese word for relationship, one that has been deepened over a long period of time through the mutual offering of material and immaterial gifts.
In traditional confucean society, guanxi derives directly from the Five Virtues that every moral man should possess (Humaneness, Loyalty, Propriety, Intellect, Trustfulness). It used to be a measure of your own humanity and a means to achieve social harmony, but over the last century it appears to have lost much of its potency.
Nowadays people generally think of guanxi as nothing more than personal networking, the attachment (enslavement?) of other people to your sphere of influence through gifts/bribes/favours. The keyword here is indebtedness, the strength of the guanxi being determined by the size of the mutual debts. By accepting a favour and paying it back, you show your social worth and your willingness to belong.
How guanxi works:
- to fail to honour guanxi is immoral even when it involves going against the public good (a remarkable twist in the confucean code of morals).
- to refuse an offer of guanxi is an affront, not immoral but unacceptable.
- guanxi is your lifeblood and without guanxi you will amount to nothing.
- your guanxi can expect you to give them a favour even if they know it's going to cost the company/government/boss you're working for.
- you may be asked to break the law: guanxi is above the law.
- it's a good show of guanxi when you take personal risks to fulfil your part of the deal.
- your guanxi can ask you to give their own guanxis the same favour you would give them and vice versa (group guanxi).
If you ask me, this is open slather for corruption. It's so widespread and ingrained that you'll find it everywhere, at every level of society, from your everyday stuff such as trying to get your kid into some school, get to the top of the hospital's surgery list, get a job/promotion, add to your household hukou, even buy/rent a property... to the really big stuff that involves billions of $ and affects the lives of millions of people. If you think it really through, every RMB that goes around can be deemed to be tainted in one way or another.
It's really hard to keep your nose clean as many Western businesspeople have found. Many times I've tried to avoid undesirable guanxi by offering them a small gift before they could give me one, basically telling them that I'm not rejecting their guanxi, just preferring to be free for now
But it can become a tiring cat-and-mouse game where you're always trying to keep the upper hand.
Communism hasn't cured the ills of the imperial regime. The power structure is still wildly arbitrary while the family/social structure has been shot to pieces after going through so much upheaval. The love of money and the pursuit of every bit of pleasure has become the obsession of the new rich... all extra reasons for guanxi to be debased and corruption to flourish. It's ironic that the poor folks in the countryside are keeping Chinese culture alive more than anybody else.
Some Chinese people will tell you guanxi is their way of life and something not to be worried about, but many others are increasingly wary about it. For me though, it doesn't matter a bit: we should call corruption wherever we see it.