There’s an interesting Q &A here with the author of a book on corruption in China. He’s what you might call cautiously optimistic:
I have more confidence in China’s war on corruption than others, not because it will significantly reduce corruption, but in the much more modest sense that they have managed to prevent the problem getting significantly worse.
If you look at either the number of individuals charged with corruption or the estimates of the severity of corruption in China by outside experts, corruption has been at about the same level for nearly a decade.
He also notes that cases go forward at very high level, which is not what you see in places where there’s been complete state capture. On the other hand it seems unlikely that with growth rates the way they have been over the past decade that this wouldn’t lift more people to the level where they were able to afford bribes or be able to demand them. Maybe all those worries about social mobility in China have something to them after all.
I still think the good graft/bad graft distinction used by Tammany politicians of old is useful, in the sense that paying to get things done may be bad, but paying to preserve the necessary conditions for living is very much worse. However, this tends to operate on a class basis: the businessman pays for favours, but the street hawker pays not to have his stuff trashed by the cops or the chengguan.
At the top of the pile you have the ability of corrupt actors to sequester the resources of the state for private use, which I think may be behind this odd case. This poor fellow was transferred from a jail in Gansu to some kind of private residence in Beijing under police guard, where he stayed for four years until he died, which seems to me to indicate that he pissed off someone powerful enough to ‘take over his case' personally.
Of course, sequestering the resources of the state couldn’t happen here.
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