Because corruption is a thing that enters from the top down. If the cadre is corrupt then corruption will be seen as &#x27;ok&#x27;. If the cadre is incorruptible then they can make a demand of those below them to act in a similar way or be booted out. The change from a corrupt state to one that isn&#x27;t takes multiple decades, it is not something you can do overnight and at any point in time the arrow can reverse. The same goes for states that have low corruption today, that is not a guarantee for low corruption in the future.<p>China is interesting in this respect, on the one hand corruption is rife, on the other it is nominally totally out of bounds and the punishments are severe. I don&#x27;t understand how those can both be true at the same time without a huge amount of selective enforcement.<p>My experience with India to date has one of utter amazement at the brashness and the degree to which corruption has infused society there. I suspect that for India a part of it is that it has social classes that are very disjoint. This creates a very fertile growth medium for corruption because it puts a lot of small people in positions of relatively large amounts of power over the lives of others.