[mdda]

But I believe that most Bloomberg terminal subscribers would argue that capitalist-style money accumulation (free markets, etc) is a good thing for an overall population, and that corruption-style money accumulation (which is the implication of the article) is a huge negative for a country.

[gwern]

But you can easily phrase it the other way and argue that corruption is good because it gives leadership an incentive to keep the capitalist system going instead of flipping back to Communism, and the cost of the payoff (a few hundred billion?) is far less than the increased welfare of the Chinese people (pulling hundreds of millions out of deep poverty).

Indeed, some have argued corruption is a good thing in general because people can buy what they want from the leadership instead of their running rampant over everything, which ameliorates any abuses: see for example Bryan Caplan http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/incorruptibly_e....