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?
ianm218 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
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
grvbck 32 minutes ago [-]
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".
fellowniusmonk 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
glenstein 25 minutes ago [-]
>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.
throwaway27448 44 minutes ago [-]
At least they try to appear anti-corruption—that's certainly more than you can say about the west.
lysace 39 minutes ago [-]
Don't confuse "the west" with the US. The US is less than half of "the west".
throwaway27448 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
myrmidon 15 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
you will see that the spread is very wide, and China/India is significantly behind most western nations.
lysace 16 minutes ago [-]
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.)
ozgrakkurt 44 minutes ago [-]
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
luqtas 19 minutes ago [-]
barbaric is society which has half of the worlwide population living with less than 6 USD per day in borderline slavery
cavoirom 17 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
mittensc 58 minutes ago [-]
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
MattDamonSpace 57 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but that’s bad right
glenstein 23 minutes ago [-]
The Achilles heel of all whataboutism is assuming someone can't consistently criticize the new thing in addition to the original thing.
mittensc 56 minutes ago [-]
of course
lyu07282 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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:
A win is a win. Could there be more wins? Glass is half full.
Barrin92 24 minutes ago [-]
>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.
casey2 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
rirze 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
feverzsj 47 minutes ago [-]
A relatively low level official can't take this much bribes. More like a scapegoat.
hangonhn 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
gitpusher 44 minutes ago [-]
It's not outside the realm of possibility for the positions he occupied. But yes, corruption is selectively cracked down upon in China
throwaway27448 46 minutes ago [-]
Over thirty years? I am surprised he didn't take more.
mothballed 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
1970-01-01 51 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if he could have lived if it was just one $325M bribe and not 30 years of bribery.
onion2k 1 hours ago [-]
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.
lonely_wanderer 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
onion2k 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
vitally3643 46 minutes ago [-]
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
greenavocado 37 minutes ago [-]
One does not simply move money out of China
arkhiver 12 minutes ago [-]
Cryptocurrency or GPUs. Both are fairly easy to obtain and even easier to move out.
Retric 28 minutes ago [-]
The options increase when you’re already breaking the law.
greenavocado 3 minutes ago [-]
They will send people after you at some point like they did to Vadym Yermolaiev
throwaway27448 45 minutes ago [-]
People get away with this all the time—you just only hear about the stupid ones.
__patchbit__ 11 minutes ago [-]
$2 million in cash flushed down the toilet, manually, that clogged the sanitation system was a very stupid funny one.
d5lt5 21 minutes ago [-]
The culture of bribes is a bit different in China. 'Mutually assured corruption' describes the situation better.
jjk166 51 minutes ago [-]
It's the wielding of power which is intoxicating, the monetary amount just illustrates how many decisions he could personally influence.
36 minutes ago [-]
mothballed 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
starik36 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
iamacyborg 30 minutes ago [-]
Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
varispeed 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
pornel 1 hours ago [-]
US president: I can take more and die quicker than the China guy!
SkinTaco 29 minutes ago [-]
Rent free
jqpabc123 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
vrganj 50 minutes ago [-]
Imagine if the US punished its corrupt officials. It might have to kill its own president.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
felooboolooomba 46 minutes ago [-]
That's a bit harsh. It's not like he took a $400 million jet.
throwaw12 59 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
mc32 51 minutes ago [-]
If we executed people in Congress who make money in a way that is illicit for the general population we’d be left with like a handful or two left in the congress. They all have PACs and or engage in insider trading.
47 minutes ago [-]
mothballed 1 hours ago [-]
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.
MaxHoppersGhost 1 hours ago [-]
Wonder who this guy pissed off in the CCP.
Rendered at 17:51:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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?
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...
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
This thing about not caring about appearances is new. (And also the only thing I commented about.)
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 agree with you, but we also can't reverse entropy.
It will have the same answer, no
who would be able to prosecute them and how?
who would even investigate them
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
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.
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.
He got away with it for 30 years. That shows at least some level of craftiness.
It's a mentality where you can't stop.
One thing that China does should be adopted in the West.
Tariffs on all things Chinese is pretty much an open admission that the West can't compete.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
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.