The index is a global indicator of public-sector corruption and makes for interesting reading. It's great living in a country with such high standards, but the flip side of that is that it really doesn't prepare us for doing business elsewhere, especially in countries that score less than 50 on the index.
A colleague of mine once got off the phone from a business call, looked at me and said: ``I think I have just been offered a bribe.'' Recognition of corruption should be the very first step in its avoidance!
Corruption is difficult to understand when you've never really been exposed to it. It's easy to think that those who partake are simply bad, but of course, like most things in life, it is never that simple. I am an avid reader, and occasionally, I read an absolute gem of a book. One of those was an autobiography by Hyeonseo Lee, The Girl with Seven Names.
Hyeonseo Lee grew up in North Korea during the famines of the 1990s, close to the border of the Yanbian region of China. Reading about her childhood is extraordinary and when she escapes North Korea into China at age 18 her story starts to read like an action novel.
It's hard to believe one person can experience so many horrendous and life-changing events in such a short time. Eventually, she returns to North Korea to help her mother and brother escape. They take a route through China, Laos and Thailand to eventually reach South Korea.
It was reading this story that I began to understand, rather than judge, what it means to live with corruption all around you (on the Corruption Index North Korea is 174th, Laos is 123rd, Thailand is 101st, China is 79th and South Korea is 52nd). If Hyeonseo had not saved money to pay bribes, she and her family would have been left for dead, on multiple occasions. What price would anyone pay for their own, or their family's life?
Making or taking a bribe is a filthy thought where we come from, but it is interesting to understand why and how it happens extensively in any one culture and at what point does any one person tip into doing something they never thought they would do. On one of my visits to China, I was able to go to Yanbian and stand at the North Korean border.
All that separated me was a barbed wire fence and a mild-looking river, the same river Hyeonseo had crossed. There was a bridge across the river, and the Chinese could walk halfway across to a gate. My colleagues and I went to cross the bridge, but none of us were allowed on to it because I was a Westerner.
Yanbian is a truly beautiful part of China with mountains and forestry and, to my delight, ginseng cultivated amongst the trees. The food of the region is heavily influenced by the many Koreans living there and, like most Chinese food, was sometimes delicious and sometimes unusual. From the border, North Korea looked benign and peaceful, hard to reconcile with the monstrous dictatorship we read about.
Sometimes, that will be as much as we experience of another culture, their food, a look across a border, a sharing of a person's story. Our understanding will be shallow, but that understanding maybe just enough to help us fight for what is right in terms of looking after each other and looking out for those who suffer.
In New Zealand, we take the right to vote in elections for granted, and I often wonder, does my one vote really make a difference? As I reflect on Hyeonseo's story, a story like that of so many others living in horrendously corrupt countries, the fact I can vote, and that it will count, is all I should need to know.
-Anna Campbell is managing director of AbacusBio Ltd, a Dunedin-based agribusiness consulting and new ventures company.
