Making law: Small-scale trade and corrupt exceptions at the Vietnam-China border

Abstract

In Vietnam’s postreform era, the proliferation of profiteering opportunities have, in addition to creating new forms of corruption, transmuted previously prevailing types of corrupt acts in multiple ways across different levels of state-society relations. Everyday corrupt practices have thus become an essential means of economic survival for many. Starting from the metaphorical framing of petty bribery as “making law,” I propose the notion of what I term “corrupt exception” as a conceptual tool to explore the power dynamics of petty corruption between state agents and small-scale traders at the Vietnam-China border. Whereas bribery is felt by local traders to create better profit opportunities, the corrupt exception likewise pushes them into a de facto illegality where they remain subjected to arbitrary “lawmaking” and excluded from legal protection. I show that the metaphors employed by small-scale traders to negotiate complicit relationships with corrupt state officials both contest and reinforce the exercise of a localized form of sovereign power in a permanent state of corrupt exception in which “law” is “made” in exchange for bribes.