Lingchi Corruption: A Thousand Cuts to Governance

By Robyn Lewis, Postgraduate scholar, Centre for Study of Corruption, Sussex University, UK & Michael Johnston, Professor Emeritus, Colgate University, USA

When seemingly small abuses compound, it hurts

Some of the most harmful corruption might be what you don't notice.

Indeed, most coverage of corruption focuses on scandals: visible instances of bribery and illegality, with cases treated individually. And much research makes a vague distinction between “grand” corruption, and “petty” corruption––often regarded as less significant. 

These distinctions do not do justice to a whole area of a more insidious kind of corruption – that also plays out in so-called advanced democracies. Our research on environmental corruption in Tasmania, Australia's smallest state, highlights this. These are seemingly small abuses of power, some legal, that collectively and over time cause cumulative harm to the public and the environment. Borrowing from the Chinese lingchi (凌遲), meaning ‘death by a thousand cuts’, we call this *lingchi corruption.

Lingchi corruption works in insidious ways 

Lingchi corruption is not just a metaphoric catch-all for corrupt events of a certain magnitude. It is a process, in a double sense, encompassing both ongoing corrupt activities and the longer-term, systemic erosion of governance. By minimizing attention and breaking down damaging consequences into individually ‘acceptable’ outcomes––even forming part of their business models ––lingchi actors can normalize and perpetuate low-visibility practices while doing long-term harm. 

In the first sense, lingchi corruption highlights what may seem to be insignificant corrupt activities that attract little attention, but that cause considerable collective harm. This is most likely to be in policy areas such as the environment or resource extraction, where regulation and enforcement may be piecemeal, poorly resourced or lack broad-based support. Here, we find that factors like scarce resources, institutional priorities, or political influence can enable seemingly minor forms corruption to escape reporting and prosecution. And so, governance is eroded. 

The public may notice little, but corrupt operators see opportunities. 

In the second sense, lingchi corruption becomes normalized as ‘business as usual’, while disjointed regulation, ineffective enforcement and the cumulative rewards of lingchi corruption facilitate more visible abuses. 

Treating corruption as isolated, closed-ended episodes can miss the ways in which low-level influence leads to the non-enforcement of regulations and laws over time. This is what lingchi corruption does.

Why existing frameworks miss lingchi corruption 

Treating corruption as isolated, closed-ended episodes can miss the ways in which low-level influence leads to the non-enforcement of regulations and laws over time. Although this might look like state capture, lingchi corruption is in fact the opposite: it is the state ‘letting go’, allowing the markets to ‘deal with’ problems that the state is not equipped to deal with or do not have the incentives to deal with them. So over time, lingchi corruption can become ‘white noise’ – business-as-usual – while what is really happening is that accountability is being undermined and public trust is being corroded. 

This will be familiar to anyone who monitors policy carefully, and to environmentalists addressing multiple dispersed abuses. But it is missing from most analytical discussions: partly because many conceptions of corruption are still shaped by grand-vs-petty distinctions that treat small yet cumulatively harmful, actions as de minimis. 

Because ecosystems rarely collapse in a single event, the environment is especially vulnerable 

The environment is especially vulnerable: abuses are often geographically dispersed while

legal challenges are prohibitive. In Tasmania, for example, the case of Gunns Pulp Mill––involving overt corruption––received huge public and media attention. But less so many smaller cases (some legal) corroding both governance and the environment, including: omitting impact assessments of infrastructure projects; avoiding regulations in aquaculture (some involving a Tasmanian subsidiary of a Canadian firm); ignoring disposal rules for contaminated waste; the destruction of Aboriginal heritage and native vegetation in illegal land clearing; and abuses in tourism, forestry, mining and energy. 

Few outside observers may see the connections among adverse events: loose regulation of agricultural chemicals, for example, can affect plant and animal life elsewhere, potentially generations later. Scientific expertise, benchmark data collection, monitoring and modelling are required but may be minimal. Those better-placed to know the consequences may have a stake in concealing them, sometimes for decades. 

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Because ecosystems rarely collapse in a single event, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ is a tragically appropriate metaphor. Lingchi corruption usually attracts little public notice as it occurs, but because it reflects systemic weaknesses, we can observe key vulnerabilities. For example, Australia, Canada and the United States have recently ‘streamlined’ environmental rules and enforcement, pleasing developers and small-government advocates but making prevention and punishment of abuses harder. They also struggle to enforce whistleblower protections; in Canada, investigations and prosecutions for pollution have declined significantly. In the US, fraudulent tax schemes exploiting provisions in environmental law benefit contractors, consultants, and tax agents. Canada also contends with ‘snow washing’ – real-estate deals channeled through shell companies to launder funds for often-anonymous beneficiaries. Where and how these developments may result in actual corruption is difficult to predict, but environmentalists are left playing ‘whack-a-mole’ on multiple fronts. What they are really fighting is lingchi corruption. 

Other sectors where lingchi corruption thrives are land use, planning, infrastructure, procurement, and public health. 

Governance gets eroded in many ways:

• Fragmented governance: dispersed responsibilities, multi-tier government structures and, increasingly, delegation of government responsibilities to consultants and for-profit firms without effective oversight

• Decisions or actions that initially may be legally and procedurally compliant, but are not monitored for cumulative effects until large consequences materialize

• ‘Salami-slicing’ large projects into small components falling beneath regulatory thresholds, permitting low-visibility approvals to cause significant damage and create precedents for similar decisions elsewhere 

• Regulatory streamlining: ‘improving efficiency’, ‘reducing duplication’ and ‘faster approvals’ based on national significance’ may be popular but abused over time, weakening reporting systems, obscuring responsibilities and reducing accountability 

  
  

High de facto enforcement thresholds emerging as investigations and prosecutions are omitted or result in ‘slap on the wrist’ types of punishment. 

Lingchi corruption needs to be taken seriously because it ultimately undermines democracy 

In any democracy, corruption’s essence is the ‘duplicitous exclusion’ of citizens from decisions affecting their lives. Lingchi corruption excludes the public via decisions attracting little attention, but in which important public interests and values are at stake. Negligence, institutional priorities and overload may contribute, but corrupt actors learn the loopholes and where thresholds of enforcement lie and how to exploit them. 

Many democracies face immense pressure from powerful economic interests to resist carbon emissions limits, defer or privatize infrastructure provision and provide ‘regulatory relief’. Those superficially palatable ideas can reduce official scrutiny while sidelining public interests and participation. Ironically, reforms imposing stricter controls may exacerbate lingchi corruption by creating detailed loopholes best known by insiders, allowing abuses to fall beneath triage thresholds of anti-corruption agencies not designed to assess complex, continuing, difficult-to-prosecute schemes. Thus, corruption becomes embedded in seemingly orderly governance in ways that are easy to miss. 

Corruption, even by a thousand cuts, weakens democratic norms, laws, and institutions. Like other less-recognized forms such as gender-related and institutional corruption, lingchi corruption must become central to corruption analysis. 

*A critical disclaimer is required: We do not use the term lingchi (凌遲) to characterize Chinese corruption or peoples––much less, to revive old stereotypes. Rather, we use a vivid metaphor to emphasize how small individual actions can have great cumulative consequences, and to highlight corrupt processes overlooked by grand-vs-petty distinctions. On environmental lingchi corruption in Tasmania, see Lewis. R.A. and M. Johnston, “Systemic Environmental Corruption in ‘Clean-Green’ Tasmania – Lessons from the Crucible”, in Williams A., R. Dobson Phillips and R. Loureiro Revilla (Eds.), The Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Corruption and the Environment. Edward Elgar Publishing. Cheltenham and Northampton (MA), forthcoming 2027. 

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Michael Johnston (Ph. D. Yale University, 1977) is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Colgate University. From January 2017 through May 2019, he was a Distinguished Professor at the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Laxenburg, Austria. His most recent book, The Conundrum of Corruption: Reform for Social Justice (co-author Scott A. Fritzen), was published by Routledge in December, 2020. Transitions to Good Governance (Edward Elgar; co-edited with Alina Mungiu-Pippidi) appeared in 2017. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2005) won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, presented by the University of Louisville. He has served as a consultant to numerous international organizations, and between 2009 and 2014 was involved in long-term reform efforts in the Philippines. In recent years he has prepared a review of issues in measuring corruption and governance for the World Bank, developed an analysis of connections between corruption and political instability for a US Government agency, and presented a lecture and chaired a panel discussion at the OECD in Paris. In 2016 he was a member of a team organized by the University of Southern California that conducted a mid-term evaluation of the Open Government Partnership. Current projects include helping develop typologies of corruption risks for the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency of the World Bank. He lives in suburban Austin, Texas, with his wife, Betsy, who will likely re-introduce cats to the household within the coming year. How long they will let us continue to live in their house remains to be seen.

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Robyn A. Lewis is an economist and biologist [M.Sc. (Oxon), B.Ec.] and M.A. candidate at the CSC, University of Sussex. Robyn has experience in agriculture, forestry and multi-objective land-use management, including project design, management and review, environmental impact assessment, and as an anti-corruption practitioner, in Africa, Asia and Australia, including The World Bank, Asian Development Bank and other international organizations. Robyn also has private sector experience and is the current custodian of a biodiverse habitat containing species found nowhere else in the world, for which she is a nominee for the 2027 Women Chiefs of Enterprise International (Australia) Environmental Impact Award. Her specializations are environmental corruption, and anti-corruption education.