Unwritten or tacit rules are everywhere, and are observed to circumvent explicit rules for personal gains in officialdom. Finding a balance between such rules and the established laws and regulations has become a must for corrupt officials to get endorsement from higher authorities for what they have done on the one hand and reaping dirty gains on the other hand.

But, never has anyone delved so deep into the historical root of under-the-table conventions as Wu Si has done. His book on the subject entitled "Qian'guize" (Tacit Rules) elaborates on how such rules have had an impact on the perversity of dynastic officialdom in the past thousands of years. The book was first published in 2001 and immediately banned. Now it was reprinted.

Qian'guize, the Chinese term he coined for the concept of under-the-table rules has become extremely popular in the past decade. No one has to think twice before associating it with whatever ways he or she has to use to lubricate the channels for the things they want to get done. It is even used as a verb to describe how someone is ripped off by such rules. When we say an actress was qian'guized, it means that she had provided the director with "special service" for the particular role she wanted to play.

There are many stories in the book to explain how established rules were undermined by the rampant resort to tacit rules by most officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Even an emperor was sometimes helpless, seeing his dynasty decay without being able to do anything about it. In such circumstances, the emperor was usually caught in a dilemma between either to kill all corrupt officials which would lead to the collapse of his dynasty's reign or to turn a blind eye in order to maintain his shaky rule as long as possible.

The last emperor of the Ming dynasty was a typical example. He knew pretty well that his officials were talking about one thing before him in the court and doing something else in their own positions. He tried in ways that he could to make his officials follow established rules, but in vain. On the day an uprising army of farmers broke into the Forbidden City, only one eunuch was behind him.

Was he not a good emperor? Yes, he was. But most officials followed different tacit rules by calculating how they can maximize their booty by abuse of power. Almost every official, no matter how low his position was, would follow a set of tacit rules, by which he could exploit his power to the utmost for his own benefit, but at the expense of the people and the dynasty.

Tacit rules are closely linked to the immediate interest of those who resort to them. It is way too natural for people to be much more concerned with their own immediate interest than with anything else. But any system has to be so designed as to have as few loopholes as possible to prevent tacit rules from becoming rampant and undermining laws and regulations.

If the pervasiveness of tacit rules reached the point of paralyzing government machinery, those at the bottom of the social scale were left with no way but to resort to whatever means they could for survival. Then, the end of a dynasty was inevitable. Plugging systemic loopholes with the rule of law, and effective supervision of power should be the lesson, I suppose, we should learn from reading the book.

(China Daily July 1, 2009)