Corruption Catch-All

In the coming week I will revert to the theme of the Russian Revolutions and their consequences; but the overnight News about Saudi Arabia, combined with discussions of the current situation in China as President Trump attends the apotheosis of President Xi, raises an omnipresent global issue.

The Saudi Crown Prince has emerged in that role after an elaborate process to bring [at last] a grandson of the hugely prolific founder of the country, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, into the pole position to be the next king: the first of the next generation to have a high degree of probability of succeeding to the notionally absolutely powerful top position. From the nineteen fifties until now a succession of sons of the first king, by a succession of his wives [many of whom were sisters, cousins and other close relations of each other], have held the post; but the lastborn among them are now in extreme old age. There is probably a registrar of the dynasty who knows exactly how many princes and princesses there are, including the offspring of Ibn Saud's brothers; many of whom are intermarried with each other. The international media report their number to be some thousands as, unlike the British Royal Family, all the family members have royal titles.

The contrasting British position is that sons and daughters of monarchs are princes and princesses, but that children of princesses and children of daughters of the monarch's sons and sons of the sons of the monarch who do not stand in the direct line of succession are not princes or princesses. Thus the children of Princess Anne, and of the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent [sons of sons of George V] are not princes or princesses. This keeps the 'inner' or 'close' royal family manageably small.

The contrasting situation in Saudi Arabia means that these thousands of royal persons expect high status and high incomes; which were affordable when the family was smaller, the oil price was higher and the monarchy was able to use its position as the 'swing producer' in OPEC to enforce the price control system that they established in 1973. With ever-more royalty and shrinking oil prices as Russia increases its influence as an oil producer and fracking develops in the USA, the Saudi model of the past century is redundant. The new Crown Prince has spent the last two years securing his position among this thousands of cousins, and is now making moves to modernise the system. There are bound to be winners and losers from such a revolution, and alliances have been formed that may or may not prove strong enough for the Crown Prince to consolidate his position for a reign of up to half a century. He has now made the big move: the arrest of dozens of individuals [including several royalty] some of whom have been ministers in the government: all of them charged with corruption.

In a system like the Saudi, where the term Byzantine denotes a situation insufficiently arcane to explain the regime in operation, almost anybody - high or lowly in terms of hierarchy - can be charged with what a German or a Belgian would recognise to be corrupt practice. Charges of corruption will be upheld against many [if not all] of the arrested parties; and the purge can go on indefinitely, as in the Stalin era in the USSR where ever-wider definitions of crimes against the state can be used simply to keep all the survivors in a state of abject subordination to the dominant power. It will be the greatest challenge for the Crown Prince, if he succeeds i holding his position through this exercise, to stop when the purge has gone far enough.

President Xi's situation in China is similar to that which the Crown Prince clearly intends to prevail in Saudi Arabia. In his first five-year term as head of the party and head of state Xi has ensured that nobody stands to challenge him during the coming five years in a way that could ensure that he is forced to stand down after his second quinquennium.  China's rise to wealth has been faster and much more broadly-based than in the case of Saudi Arabia. The control of the country by the party has meant that the power-brokers in every region have been able to grant and deny licenses and permissions for every kind of activity; thus successful individuals in the buccaneering capitalism that has emerged have necessarily squared themselves with the power structure. Some people in power have held to the standards of Confucian and Leninist integrity that have been expected of them: some have not. Some can have cases manufactured against them, in what is ultimately a dictatorship: some guilty people can be so useful to the top men that their crimes can - pro tem , at least - be ignored.

Precisely the same sorts of process are happening in China and Saudi: the consolidation of the power of the dictator is secured - and gains at least a good measure of popular support - by bringing guilty exploiters of public office to account. Simple!