I sometimes see people "celebrate" this, with the rationale that China is cracking down on white-collar crimes and handing out sentences unheard of in the west.
But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
I think the way to determine how real this is: is the corruption allowed to damage the real economy? Most of the problems of Africa and South America are linked to that answer being "yes".
Probably not but it's hard to really pin this down. On the one hand, China's rise has in the recent past has been phenomenal but that kind of rapid cleanup has always been accompanied by repression and destruction of political rivals. So. perhaps a bit of both.
Are you claiming Europe is not obviously corrupt? Or Latin America? Or Korea, or Japan? I can't speak to Australia or New Zealand, I suppose.
Corruption is, of course, universal. China has a corruption problem that will be eternally difficult to tackle from the top-down—local officials are notoriously much more corrupt than central ones. But in the west, we simply pretend to not have the issue at all, or we simply make it legal. I would prefer if our politicians or popular media could at least acknowledge this.
And not just because corruption has some "indirect taxation" effect, but also because low corruption/trust is a big enabler for a society.
You are never gonna get rid of clannish mentality, vigilantism, nepotism and other undesirable behavior if your citizens don't have any trust in the system.
Europe is prosecuting the Epstein Pedos. Trump is protecting his friends
Corruption is everywhere and varies in degree. The US likes to claim a mantle of superiority when it seems quite the opposite. We have a bully/greatest conman ever in the white house
We improve it by ensuring the same people don't dominate the justice system and that prosecutions still happen whenever they don't. It was Biden's and his AG's job to do something about this and he fumbled.
Killing people in any context is barbaric because it is not possible to bring someone back from the dead.
I’m not a law expert but it seems pretty basic that there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment.
Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence, which doesn’t happen anywhere in the world as far as I can understand.
So harsher punishment means people with less power will get shafted harder
I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?
> Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence
I am also unconvinced. I don't think it is fair to treat a child like an adult and I think those in power should have more stringent standards and larger consequences for violating them.
So what is the alternative punishment for folks like this who have destroyed the lives of countless people ? Hard labour for life in a mine until death ?
>Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing
no need to speculate, it's already happened. Zhou Yongkang who was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest governing body in Chinese politics) was prosecuted, and up until that point people at the top were considered relatively untouchable. Xi also axed the last to vice chairmen of the central military commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, that's the commander in chief of the PLA.
I understand that perspective to some degree, but imagine a hypothetical country with say, two parties in power, where prosecutors only crack down on white collar criminals if they are supporters of one party and not the other. We would call that system corrupt, and probably not celebrate that at least some of the criminals face justice.
Also, from a practical standpoint, charging some and not others is not necessarily better if the selection is made politically. That moves the needle from "at least something got done" to "law is just a tool of oppression".
How else do you propose a system that is fucked like that ever gets unfucked?
What you are alluding to in a kinda of handwavy way is that once a situation is sufficiently corrupt there is no path out of it that includes any amount of justice.
I think your attitude betrays an epistemic position that basically the rule of law can't exist and can't ever be recovered.
To unfuck a system like that you have to have a clean reset of sorts. It will feel unjust because past criminals will all go free, but you have to prioritize future stability. You offer amnesty for past crimes in exchange for absolute transparency and massive structure reforms moving forward.
Or, you do what the democratic party in the US has been afraid to do: Rip the bandaid off, accusations of weaponization of the DOJ be damned. The parent's hypothetical situation is precisely what is happening in the US right now where Garland failed to prosecute, and the entire democratic party was far too afraid of appearing to weaponize the justice system meanwhile the opposition has no qualms about doing so. Yes, the public will view it as entirely partisan but there's no other path forward.
But if you just do nothing at all, eventually the social contract breaks. The cost of the corruption becomes too high and the state fails, or you get a forced regime change.
> But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
> thus celebration that at least something got done
Is it really something to celebrate if:
1. Someone got sentenced to death because they lost some internal power struggle, and bribery was falsely used as the public reason?
2. The guy's getting killed as a scapegoat, or because he pissed off his superiors by not sharing more of his bribes, etc.?
>it's the choice between "prosecute this one or nobody"
Even that assumes a normal of being lucky that anything is prosecuted, ever. So it's good but against a low bar rather than rising to the bar parent commenter suggested.
> Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
The west is inundated with simplistic anti-chinese propaganda, so you would never perceive it as such, the way it would be presented to you in the west is as the evil dictator Xi Jingping purging his opposition, for instance:
What happens to the money in these cases? I could imagine the official taking solace knowing the money he amassed over the years would eventually go his family.
Hang on. City level officials play an incredibly important role in China. While Nanjing is not in the same tier as Shanghai, Beijing, or Shenzhen, it is in the tier just below them. It is the provincial capital of one of China's most important provinces -- GDP similar to Texas. Many large Chinese companies are often tied to specific cities -- they get grants and subsidies via the city they are located in.
This guy did it over 30 years so it is feasible.
Scapegoat isn't the right term but I think it is very possible he is being executed to essentially send a message. I think your bigger point that there are way more corrupt officials than just this guy involved seems very plausible.
That's not how this works. It really depends on how close you are to a position, where people might want to bribe you. Low provincial officials with direct ties to local land development might e.g. be able to take many more bribes than a highly ranked official in an office that is far removed from economic activity.
Nah he took the bribes and probably paid 90% upward/laterally. Being the guy that actually takes the bribe is likely part of how he got promoted to where he is, in a way, like a soldier who gets promoted for being a calculated risk taker.
I don't really understand the mentality of people who do this sort of criminal activity. If he'd stopped after, say, $5m and just retired he'd probably have managed to get away with it. Continuing to such a ridiculous degree through sheer greed led him to a death sentence. That's just plain stupid.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Unless you are extremely crafty, you don’t get to retire from this sort of criminality. Everyone who enabled you wants more and you have a semi-permanent metaphorical sword hanging over your head.
I think your logic makes sense, if this was both logical and about the money. But it seems to be more about greed, discontentment, and "more". There is no limit to "more".
Yup, it's called greed. It's a part of human nature. That's one reason societies create laws and penalties: to discourage harmful behavior and keep that instinct in check.
Main difference between death penalty in US and China, is in US police officers easily sentence subjects to death and the courts do it with great difficulty. In China the inverse.
For instance, high level executive Bryan Malinowski was executed by the ATF and barely anyone noticed, but if the courts had sentenced him in such way, there would be great outrage.
I sometimes see people "celebrate" this, with the rationale that China is cracking down on white-collar crimes and handing out sentences unheard of in the west.
But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
I think the way to determine how real this is: is the corruption allowed to damage the real economy? Most of the problems of Africa and South America are linked to that answer being "yes".
5 of the 7 highest ranking officials have been purged in recent years [1].
It’s not totally clear what the consequences were for those purged or if their crimes were legit but seems like they are all in prison.
[1]. https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-inevitability...
Probably not but it's hard to really pin this down. On the one hand, China's rise has in the recent past has been phenomenal but that kind of rapid cleanup has always been accompanied by repression and destruction of political rivals. So. perhaps a bit of both.
At least they try to appear anti-corruption—that's certainly more than you can say about the west.
Don't confuse "the west" with the US. The US is less than half of "the west".
They're not wrong. It's definitely spread throughout EU too.
Are you claiming Europe is not obviously corrupt? Or Latin America? Or Korea, or Japan? I can't speak to Australia or New Zealand, I suppose.
Corruption is, of course, universal. China has a corruption problem that will be eternally difficult to tackle from the top-down—local officials are notoriously much more corrupt than central ones. But in the west, we simply pretend to not have the issue at all, or we simply make it legal. I would prefer if our politicians or popular media could at least acknowledge this.
> Corruption is, of course, universal.
So is crime. But it's all about prevalence.
And not just because corruption has some "indirect taxation" effect, but also because low corruption/trust is a big enabler for a society.
You are never gonna get rid of clannish mentality, vigilantism, nepotism and other undesirable behavior if your citizens don't have any trust in the system.
If you just look at e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Corruptio...
you will see that the spread is very wide, and China/India is significantly behind most western nations.
You are shifting the goalposts. You first said "at least they try to appear anti-corruption".
This thing about not caring about appearances is new. (And also the only thing I commented about.)
Europe is prosecuting the Epstein Pedos. Trump is protecting his friends
Corruption is everywhere and varies in degree. The US likes to claim a mantle of superiority when it seems quite the opposite. We have a bully/greatest conman ever in the white house
You can ask the same about inner circle of current US leadership
It will have the same answer, no
who would be able to prosecute them and how?
who would even investigate them
Yeah but that’s bad right
The Achilles heel of all whataboutism is assuming someone can't consistently criticize the new thing in addition to the original thing.
It's not whataboutism if you point out question was naive. (answer is the same everywhere and has always been the same)
Inner circle leadership won't be prosecuted anywhere as long as their group holds some power.
So, then, question is, how can this be improved?, can it be improved?
We improve it by ensuring the same people don't dominate the justice system and that prosecutions still happen whenever they don't. It was Biden's and his AG's job to do something about this and he fumbled.
of course
Killing people in any context is barbaric because it is not possible to bring someone back from the dead.
I’m not a law expert but it seems pretty basic that there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment.
Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence, which doesn’t happen anywhere in the world as far as I can understand.
So harsher punishment means people with less power will get shafted harder
> there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment
I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?
> Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence
I am also unconvinced. I don't think it is fair to treat a child like an adult and I think those in power should have more stringent standards and larger consequences for violating them.
So what is the alternative punishment for folks like this who have destroyed the lives of countless people ? Hard labour for life in a mine until death ?
barbaric is society which has half of the worlwide population living with less than 6 USD per day in borderline slavery
> I’m not a law expert but it seems pretty basic that there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment.
I agree with you, but we also can't reverse entropy.
>Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing
no need to speculate, it's already happened. Zhou Yongkang who was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest governing body in Chinese politics) was prosecuted, and up until that point people at the top were considered relatively untouchable. Xi also axed the last to vice chairmen of the central military commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, that's the commander in chief of the PLA.
You're trying to approach from the wrong side
it's not a question of "prosecute this one or the other person" - it's the choice between "prosecute this one or nobody"
thus celebration that at least something got done
I understand that perspective to some degree, but imagine a hypothetical country with say, two parties in power, where prosecutors only crack down on white collar criminals if they are supporters of one party and not the other. We would call that system corrupt, and probably not celebrate that at least some of the criminals face justice.
Also, from a practical standpoint, charging some and not others is not necessarily better if the selection is made politically. That moves the needle from "at least something got done" to "law is just a tool of oppression".
How else do you propose a system that is fucked like that ever gets unfucked?
What you are alluding to in a kinda of handwavy way is that once a situation is sufficiently corrupt there is no path out of it that includes any amount of justice.
I think your attitude betrays an epistemic position that basically the rule of law can't exist and can't ever be recovered.
I think that's pretty defeatist and lame.
To unfuck a system like that you have to have a clean reset of sorts. It will feel unjust because past criminals will all go free, but you have to prioritize future stability. You offer amnesty for past crimes in exchange for absolute transparency and massive structure reforms moving forward.
Or, you do what the democratic party in the US has been afraid to do: Rip the bandaid off, accusations of weaponization of the DOJ be damned. The parent's hypothetical situation is precisely what is happening in the US right now where Garland failed to prosecute, and the entire democratic party was far too afraid of appearing to weaponize the justice system meanwhile the opposition has no qualms about doing so. Yes, the public will view it as entirely partisan but there's no other path forward.
But if you just do nothing at all, eventually the social contract breaks. The cost of the corruption becomes too high and the state fails, or you get a forced regime change.
> But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
> thus celebration that at least something got done
Is it really something to celebrate if:
1. Someone got sentenced to death because they lost some internal power struggle, and bribery was falsely used as the public reason?
2. The guy's getting killed as a scapegoat, or because he pissed off his superiors by not sharing more of his bribes, etc.?
>it's the choice between "prosecute this one or nobody"
Even that assumes a normal of being lucky that anything is prosecuted, ever. So it's good but against a low bar rather than rising to the bar parent commenter suggested.
A win is a win. Could there be more wins? Glass is half full.
> Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
The west is inundated with simplistic anti-chinese propaganda, so you would never perceive it as such, the way it would be presented to you in the west is as the evil dictator Xi Jingping purging his opposition, for instance:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41670162
The top is already pushed with prisoner for life. In a tiered society a well functioning country focuses on the tier that is current bottleneck.
What happens to the money in these cases? I could imagine the official taking solace knowing the money he amassed over the years would eventually go his family.
Until his family receives the bill for the bullet of $325M
the reason i dislike seeing these articles on HN is that:
1. strong defensive positions float to the top... which could be astroturfing.
2. the merits of the concept aren't discussed; the convo falls back to whataboutism.
maybe it's all fair, but on a site where everyone's ~anonymous, it's hard to take the discussion at face value.
I wonder if he could have lived if it was just one $325M bribe and not 30 years of bribery.
A relatively low level official can't take this much bribes. More like a scapegoat.
Hang on. City level officials play an incredibly important role in China. While Nanjing is not in the same tier as Shanghai, Beijing, or Shenzhen, it is in the tier just below them. It is the provincial capital of one of China's most important provinces -- GDP similar to Texas. Many large Chinese companies are often tied to specific cities -- they get grants and subsidies via the city they are located in.
This guy did it over 30 years so it is feasible.
Scapegoat isn't the right term but I think it is very possible he is being executed to essentially send a message. I think your bigger point that there are way more corrupt officials than just this guy involved seems very plausible.
That's not how this works. It really depends on how close you are to a position, where people might want to bribe you. Low provincial officials with direct ties to local land development might e.g. be able to take many more bribes than a highly ranked official in an office that is far removed from economic activity.
It's not outside the realm of possibility for the positions he occupied. But yes, corruption is selectively cracked down upon in China
Over thirty years? I am surprised he didn't take more.
Nah he took the bribes and probably paid 90% upward/laterally. Being the guy that actually takes the bribe is likely part of how he got promoted to where he is, in a way, like a soldier who gets promoted for being a calculated risk taker.
I don't really understand the mentality of people who do this sort of criminal activity. If he'd stopped after, say, $5m and just retired he'd probably have managed to get away with it. Continuing to such a ridiculous degree through sheer greed led him to a death sentence. That's just plain stupid.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Unless you are extremely crafty, you don’t get to retire from this sort of criminality. Everyone who enabled you wants more and you have a semi-permanent metaphorical sword hanging over your head.
Unless you are extremely crafty, you don’t get to retire from this sort of criminality.
He got away with it for 30 years. That shows at least some level of craftiness.
Or you use your single digit millions of currency to buy an island and retire for a decade or two while everyone forgets you exist
One does not simply move money out of China
Cryptocurrency or GPUs. Both are fairly easy to obtain and even easier to move out.
The options increase when you’re already breaking the law.
They will send people after you at some point like they did to Vadym Yermolaiev
I think your logic makes sense, if this was both logical and about the money. But it seems to be more about greed, discontentment, and "more". There is no limit to "more".
People get away with this all the time—you just only hear about the stupid ones.
$2 million in cash flushed down the toilet, manually, that clogged the sanitation system was a very stupid funny one.
It's called greed, as you aptly pointed out.
It's the wielding of power which is intoxicating, the monetary amount just illustrates how many decisions he could personally influence.
The culture of bribes is a bit different in China. 'Mutually assured corruption' describes the situation better.
Once you start high-profile criminal activity you have to keep doing it to pay off the right people, as soon as you retire you're fucked.
Think of Breaking Bad. His wife literally asked him this same question. When is it enough?
It's a mentality where you can't stop.
Yup, it's called greed. It's a part of human nature. That's one reason societies create laws and penalties: to discourage harmful behavior and keep that instinct in check.
Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
It's a shame we relabelled corruption as lobbying. The damage it has done is untold.
One thing that China does should be adopted in the West.
Corruption is the most significant threat China has left now that Western capitalism has surrendered.
Tariffs on all things Chinese is pretty much an open admission that the West can't compete.
Imagine if the US punished its corrupt officials. It might have to kill its own president.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
That's a bit harsh. It's not like he took a $400 million jet.
Main difference between death penalty in US and China, is in US police officers easily sentence subjects to death and the courts do it with great difficulty. In China the inverse.
For instance, high level executive Bryan Malinowski was executed by the ATF and barely anyone noticed, but if the courts had sentenced him in such way, there would be great outrage.
US president: I can take more and die quicker than the China guy!
Rent free
Wonder who this guy pissed off in the CCP.