Because corruption is a thing that enters from the top down. If the cadre is corrupt then corruption will be seen as 'ok'. 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'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.
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't understand how those can both be true at the same time without a huge amount of selective enforcement.
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.
I think it's the other way round: corruption, or at least nepotism, is the natural state of man just as dictatorship is the natural state of government. It takes considerable effort and ideological groundwork to build anything else. Just as you can't airdrop democracy onto countries.
For example in the UK, if one were to write a history of corruption-fighting there would be three big strands since the 1500s. Religion: the replacement of a church that sold salvation with (sometimes extreme) Protestant moralism. Military: at one point commissions in the army were bought and sold. This practice was replaced with more meritocratic promotion in order to win wars. And financial: English law seems to be considered one of the world's fairest regimes for contract law, and is often used for contracts between non-English big companies.
I don't think this is universally true. I think corruption or some version of it tends to be more common nearer the top, but does not always filter down. When it filters down, that's when the whole system becomes corrupt and there are many degrees of corruption a system might have.
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't understand how those can both be true at the same time without a huge amount of selective enforcement.
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.