[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).