[hamhand]

Accepting bribes and risking it being used against you is for low-level officials now, for those from humble beginnings who had had nothing but poverty and being treaded on, so they enjoy their priviledges extra hard, you now regularly hear news of corrupt Chinese officials with hundreds of millions in bribes, hundreds of mistresses and condos. But they are taken because of political struggles not for their crimes, no one is allowed to be clean in this game.

Those with immense political clout, who are born red with innate immunity, they play financial games. It's largely legal, much more profitable and effortless. The NYT has written many articles about Chinese listed companies with red investors and princelings.

[maeln]

> no one is allowed to be clean in this game.

That is why corruption is endemic to authoritarian regime. In a state where it is impossible to climb the ladder without accepting bribes and giving them, you make sure everybody and guilty and its easy to do some "clean-up" whenever you need it.

Anti-corruption operations in authoritarian regime is just this, replacing problematic cronies with more faithful ones.

Systemic corruption is a proven mean of control.

[dirtyid]

Corruption is a defacto development mechanism for making state funds behave more like free market allocation in China. It's the reason why China is the only country where increased corruption is correlated to increased growth - a paradox according to classical development theories. This is posited by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director for China, Russia, and Former Soviet Union Republics. Everywhere else corruption leads to inefficient allocation. The secret sauce is connecting corruption with bureaucratic incentives, i.e. graft a little on the side but they better build X new residential units, Y infrastructure to meet Z urbanization goals as dictated by the central committee. Chinese mixed-economy is/was* an elegant hack to have a more capitalist market while preserving a nominally socialist economic narrative, and an apt development tool for her needs.

*Was - the caveat to this system is that prolonged corruption is damaging to social stability - hence Xi's anticorruption drive that later analysis have determined to be more pragmatic than pure power grab - CCDI doesn't punish 1 million officials for shits and giggles. But up until recently, it's mostly targetted low-level "flies" versus high-level "tigers" - which I surmise is much more politically difficult, but high-ranking shakeups are underway since last year. As for sincerity of these reforms, wiki-leaked analysis on Xi when he was vice-premier can be summarized as: not the smartest but utterly incorruptible (his family not so much).

[Nokinside]

I remember reading from traffic accident in China involving lorry that was loaded full of money. Some officials get so much bribes that their problems are similar to Colombian drug lord.