Corporate culture has a guiding and restrictive role in corporate strategic choices and business decisions. Corporate corruption culture may distort corporate strategic choices and business decisions. The influence of corporate corruption culture on corporate technological innovation is therefore worthy of further study. Basing on literature, the paper firstly performs a theoretical analysis to find that since local governments in China control the key resources needed by enterprises, in order to obtain the competitive advantage, enterprises can not only enhance their own capabilities through innovation activities, but also obtain government resources through rent-seeking activities. However, due to their limited resources, enterprises can only choose between innovation activities and rent-seeking activities. Corruption culture makes enterprises tend to engage in rent-seeking activities by enhancing their preference for rent-seeking activities and reducing their costs of rent-seeking activities, thereby inhibiting technological innovation of enterprises. The paper then takes Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2017 as a research sample to empirically investigate the real impact of corporate corruption culture on corporate technological innovation. We construct a corporate corruption culture measure based on culture background information of firm executives, and use corporate R&D inputs as the main indicator of corporate technological innovation. On this basis, this paper initially uses a panel two-way fixed-effects model, and then uses the mean value of corruption culture in other companies in the same industry as an instrumental variable for corporate corruption culture to perform two-stage least squares regressions to control potential endogeneity bias. The regression results show that corporate corruption culture significantly inhibits corporate technological innovation at least at the level of 5%. This result is robust to different dependent variables and sample groupings. Further research shows that there is still heterogeneity in this effect: corporate corruption culture in politically connected enterprises has a more significant negative effect on corporate technological innovation because the rent-seeking costs of politically connected enterprises are lower, so they are more inclined to profit from rent-seeking activities rather than innovation activities. In areas with better protection of intellectual property rights, the negative impact of corporate corrupt culture on corporate technological innovation appears weaker because a sound intellectual property protection system can improve the income of enterprises’ innovation activities. The research findings of heterogeneity also verify the mechanism proposed by above theoretical analysis: the trade-off between innovation activities and rent-seeking activities of enterprises due to their own limited resources. Based on the above research, we put forward policy recommendations such as cultivating Incorruptible culture, accelerating the marketization of factor allocation, strengthening intellectual property protection, and promoting technological innovation of enterprises. The paper for the first time investigates the impact of corruption culture upon corporate innovation, therefore enriches literature about economic consequences of corruption and determinants of corporate innovation.