Absolutist ethical and normative definitions have come to dominate the study of corruption.The medieval school men traced corruption to man's "insatiable greed," and from the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century democratic state we have inherited the definition of corruption as "the misuse of public funds by an official in order to illegally enhance his income".The scholastic view is inadeQuate because it ignores the influence of varying institutional conditions on corruption .The post Englightenment definition is time-bound and contains a value judgment.The traditional official is better seen in terms of the values of his owwn society and,time in whichhis role resembled that of the businessman in important respects.In Ch'ing China the official was somewhat like a businessman in that