文化视野下中国社会中的礼物与贿赂

Gifts and Bribery in Chinese Society from Cultural Perspective

在不同的社会文化背景下,对什么是腐败行为有着不同的判断标准。特别是在中国社会中,个体行动者通过自我道德化表演的策略将不被法律认可的贿赂掩饰和转变为能够被社会规范所接受的礼物,以此来刻意模糊礼物和贿赂的界限。通过对中国社会中礼物的运作逻辑及其社会文化意义、以及法律在认定贿赂过程中局限性的考察,可以看出礼物和贿赂的辨析方向:礼物交换运行在私人生活领域,双方以同质性的形式依据交换物的象征性价值进行交换,并在这一过程中构建起交换主体之间的关系;贿赂运行在公共领域,双方以异质性的形式依据交换物的经济性价值进行交换,更强调交换物本身数量的关系。

Different social and cultural backgrounds have different criteria on what is corruption. Especially in China, some in-dividuals deliberately blur the boundaries of gifts and bribes by camouflaging and transforming the bribes which can not be recognized by the law into the gifts accepted by social norms. The paper comes up with the differentiating direction of gifts and bribes through investigating the operational logic of sending presents, its social and cultural meanings, and the limitations of law in identifying some gifts as bribery. When gift exchange is conducted in the field of private life, both sides exchange gifts by reference to its symbolic value in the form of homogeneity and build up the relationship between the acting subjects. When bribery is conducted in the field of the public domain, they exchange gift by reference to its economic value in the form of het-erogeneity and put more emphasis on the exchange subjects’quantitative relationship.