ABSTRACT
When the Chinese talk about corruption, many cite the following joke: “If you ask all the government officials to stand in a line, and arrest all of them for corruption, you probably will have wrongly accused someone. But if you arrest every other one, you will surely have missed some [corrupt officials].” We have, of course, no way to substantiate this claim, but given the publicly available data, stories from our informants, and the fact that the new leadership headed by President Xi is treating corruption as its utmost priority and an existential threat, we can safely say that corruption is a cancer in the political system in China that both the top leadership and the populace want to remove. A report released by the CPC in December 2013 stated that 108,000 officials were punished during the first 9 months of the year. 1
