Corruption in China

The New York Times writes on how China's government is doing with its anti-corruption campaign:

One by one, the officials spoke candidly on camera about how they abused their power and accumulated enormous wealth. They looked relaxed, confident and even happy as they described bribes, kickbacks and other perks of corruption.

Getting seafood boxes stuffed with $300,000. Owning a fancy house for nearly every season. Running red lights without getting tickets.

The documentary work, produced by the state, was meant to celebrate the success of the top Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption campaign. But the series seemed to prove the opposite: The party hasn’t figured out a way to stamp out corruption.

“Zero Tolerance” is the eighth in a series of shows about fighting corruption that the party has produced since 2014 — and the best journalistically and artistically.

But the show’s producers, the state broadcaster and the party’s anti-graft enforcer, seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were airing the dirtiest laundry of the Communist Party, which, as the ruling party of a one-party state, has no one to blame for the rampant corruption but itself.

At times the documentary felt like a political satire show that offered absurdly detailed yet credible insights into how the corrupted acts were conducted and what drives its senior officials. And, yes, the motivations were the usual ones: power, money and sex.

Sun Lijun, then a vice minister of public security, in 2020, 

described in the documentary how he would receive boxes of  

“seafood,” stuffed with $300,000 in cash

Here is what I learned from watching it:
1) It’s awesome to be a Chinese official: Officials can enjoy many perks, big and small; get all their whims pampered; and live a privileged lifestyle that even money can’t buy.

Wang Fuyu, formerly a deputy party secretary in Hainan Province and later in Guizhou Province, asked businesspeople to buy him houses in three cities for different seasons: winter on tropical Hainan Island, summer in the cool Guizhou Plateau, and spring and fall in the southern city of Shenzhen. An avid golfer, he had a mansion on a golf course and could start swinging as soon as he stepped out of his door.

2) It’s all in the family: The officials weren’t usually directly involved. A lot of times their wives, children and siblings acted on their behalf by taking the bribes or channeling them through shell companies.

Sons of two senior officials in Inner Mongolia set up a coal company that had no staff, capital or real business activities. Their only “work” was to sign contracts that let them buy coal at low prices and sell it at high ones.

3) Power is money: The Chinese government has a lot of say in the economy because it owns almost all the land, natural resources and banks. Officials, in turn, have enormous power to pick winners and losers at their whim, leaving a lot of room for corruption.

Some of the officials saw nothing wrong with the power-for-money arrangement.

“I always felt that they owed me,” Liu Guoqiang, former vice governor of northeastern Liaoning Province, said of the businesspeople who bribed him. “I helped them growing from small to big. They gave me money because they were genuinely grateful.” He accepted bribes worth $55 million. (Ahh, the awesome power of the human mind to rationalize anything inconvenient, including blatant corruption) (emphasis added)

Not surprisingly, some of the public isn't reacting the way the Chinese government expected. So, it has started censoring the documentary. One observant and understandably grumpy Chinese citizen, a little tater, commented: “I don’t understand why little potatoes like us should watch ‘Zero Tolerance.’ Is it to remind us how poor and pathetic our lives are?” 

Good question comrade tater tot! Hm, maybe this documentary ought to be censored. It's got some capitalist microaggressions in it!

Why mention Chinese government corruption 

when we are awash in it here?

Good question comrades! I mention Chinese government corruption because it is dead-on relevant to the US. The underlying drivers of corruption and its persistence, power, money and sex, are the same in the US government as they are in the Chinese government. Shocking as this revelation may be to many self-righteous ideologues, but few cynics, humans are human in both the US and China. That is especially true for men with raging libidos. 

Power + testosterone = bad combination.

Power + wealth + testosterone = worse combination.

The thought keeps coming back that men are often bad at leadership and women would probably do better on balance. That is because women might not think and act with their sex hormones and nasty bits nearly as much as inherently defective men and their nasty bits.

Power + estrogen ± wealth = unknown combination.

Also note the same mental trait of rationalizing and justifying the blatantly irrational and unjustifiable, e.g., “I always felt that they owed me.” That is a core human cognitive biology trait. It is rampant among ideologues and other people simply lusting after power and/or wealth. That is probably also true for most demagogues, autocrats, plutocrats, narcissists, religious zealots, crackpots, and the like (QAnon, the GOP, the ex-president, Mitch McConnell, Young Earthers, Flat Earthers, Cube-shape Earthers, etc.).

The take home lesson here: With few exceptions, humans are going to be human, especially powerful and/or wealthy humans, no matter how often or self-righteously they deny it. Or as federal court judge Richard Posner once astutely quipped: I do not myself believe that many people do things because they think they are the right thing to do . . . . I do not think that knowledge of what is morally right is motivational in any serious sense for anyone except a handful of saints.

Jeez, not even all the saints can break away from what they are by their evolutionary heritage and biology.