Corruption, particularly in the public official based definition which is dominant in reform China, involves the violation of administrative ethics and responsabilities for private gain. Corruption has long been a key factor in analyzing and uderstanding modernizatio in Communist and Third World countries. Corruption has the potential to undermine a regime's legitimacy and power as well as a nation's economy. Moreover, by contributing to both economic and political polarization, it also has the potential to significantly influence the social stratification and overall social to significantly influence the social stratification and overall social structure of societies in the midst of significant political, economic and social transformation; in other words, how they `modernize'. While the majority of Chinese analyses of corruption recognize the threat posed by corruption, they disagree on the sources and consequences of such corruption, and thus on the means for controlling and/or eliminating it. The success of any anti-corruption process is determined by a) the causes and consequences of corruption and the ways in which they are perceived or blocked out by the regime's analytical framework; b) regime goals, including the degree to which, by promoting the transformation of the forms of legitimate economic intercorse, it encourages changing what is defined as corruption and c) the degree to which it is capable of accomplishing its goals once set. However, inasmuch as the dominant Chinese analysis tends to excluse certain key factors, frequently including the regime's goals in `modernizing' Chinese society, the present anti-corruption policies are not likely to be successful