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China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

bbc.com

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Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#371

Post by yanhangyhy »

While Xi Jinping is heavily criticized in private within China, he truly attaches great importance to punishing corruption. The fundamental reason is that as China underwent reform and opening up, it abandoned the Maoist emphasis on equality for the people. As a result, interest groups have continuously expanded and begun to severely impact economic development. In the past, it was still possible to encourage officials to serve the people through rationality and grand socialist ideals. Now, with the fading of the former, severe punishment must be used to correct the course.

Additionally, there are two noteworthy aspects regarding the unique characteristics of Chinese law:

(1) The characteristic of "politics over law" in China has gained increasing approval online. Previously, many people admired and envied Western judicial independence, but more and more people are realizing the drawbacks of this system.

(2) China has always been very cautious regarding the execution of the death penalty. Even during the feudal dynasties, official executions remained rare and typically required imperial review. In essence, China still operates under a model of governance by Confucian elites.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#372

Post by cindyllm »

bs65 wrote: post #343
Danox wrote: post #115

The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant that was one of the largest industrial catastrophes in the world let alone China. If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do…

"If you get caught". Do the math on how many get caught per capita. Its like worrying about a random coconut falling on your head. Fighting corruption in unequal societies is not possible because ambitious people born without wealth and status, and constantly bombarded with signals from birth that wealth and status is a sign of success, will do whatever it takea to get it. The Law doesnt reduce corruption. Its just a…

[dead]

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#373

Post by fsuts »

ebbi wrote: post #292
fsuts wrote: post #280

Hopefully China will advance to a stage where they ban the death penalty like in many other countries.

> advance Like those 'advanced' countries that don't have death penalties but are silent - or arming/funding - a genocide? I guess some deaths are ok.

Separate issues, don’t mix them for your own personal priorities.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#374

Post by qnleigh »

kdamica wrote: post #140

Doesn't hold a candle to the scale of Heshen's crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen

> he was described as the most corrupt official in Chinese history... Heshen is remembered as one of the richest men in history... His total property was... reputed to be equivalent to the imperial revenue of the Qing government for 12 years.

Damn

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#375

Post by reinitctxoffset »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #354
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right. When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but t…

> we had shame back then The collapse of our standards has been heartbreaking to see and I am observing that most are simply in denial.

This comes and goes in seasons. At the turn of the last century the broligarchs of the time (they called them robber barons then) had the game stitched up worse than today. They owned the state legislatures (who elected the senators at that time) lock, stock, and barrel. They bought laws as they pleased.

The mores of the time caused them to be a little more circumspect about their pornographic rapine of the body politic, but they squeezed just as hard and their fists were stronger. Children died working in factories, diseases of poverty claimed entire city quarters, Pinkertons shot striking workers flat dead and walked away like ICE with a brisk stride before they'd even holstered their weapon the way I read it.

Just like today they paid no tax of any kind. And we're heading back there at speed. The typical person is closer to being in an Amazon warehouse where someone has died or the subject of an OSHA report that Instacart hushed up than they were five years ago, things are getting worse for most everyone.

But a few things broke the public's way, a couple of muckracking journalists tee'd it up, Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, you get one class traitor in the White House, and in less than thirty years the robber barons had lost it all, the economy goes into hyperdrive, the working man goes to sleep every night knowing, not hoping, that his children will live far better than him.

This one comes back around too, and the endless vulgarity and corruption on every surface that can render a photo or a sentence? That's not organic someone is paying for all that, it ebbs and flows too. I'm optimistic we can have cool R-rated movies and no banned books without hustler culture Instagram and celebrity yachting YouTube being crammed into every eligible impression.

Until then?

The worse? The better.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#376

Post by ebbi »

fsuts wrote: post #373
ebbi wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> advance Like those 'advanced' countries that don't have death penalties but are silent - or arming/funding - a genocide? I guess some deaths are ok.

Separate issues, don’t mix them for your own personal priorities.

I thought a life was a life, but given you stated it's 'separate issues', thanks for proving my point.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#377

Post by harimau777 »

prewett wrote: post #295
kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally the only people that get harshly punished in the west are the ones who steal/defraud from rich people.

Who's defrauding poor people? The risk/reward is much better for defrauding rich people...

Wage theft is the most common form of theft in America.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#378

Post by defrost »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #358
defrost wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brother, I eat at a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan pretty regularly. Honest question here; is it a traditional Uyghur owned and managed restaurant freely frequented by local Uyghurs as a living expression of past and ongoing Uyghur culture, or is it more a Disney "themed Uyghur restaurant" with the same relationship to Uyghur culture as Outback Steakhouse has to actual IRL Australian food and culture (ie three tenths o…

It's run by a family from there, they speak dialect among themselves which is very much not Wuhanhua. The food is only slightly xinjiang actually, its a stretch noodle shop with a couple of lamb dishes. But even if it were the latter.. even that would go against the narrative of total cultural hostility?

In context, and I'm not just thinking of Uyghur culture in China here, the presence of {X}-like restaurants can mean a lot of things.

Majority culture "celebrating" / "allowing" minority culture restaurants, clubs, bars, etc happens in many different ways with many differing meanings, complicated layers even.

Black Harlem in New York went through stages of being an outpost of US black culture(s) (from US North and South, urban, rural, "African"), a hip place for hip white people, birth place for new takes on old culture, etc. All that while the attitude of majority culture in the US fluxed a few times wrt black minority culture.

TLDR; It's hard to get a read on what a Uyghur restaurant in Wuhan means either way in the greater China attitude toward the re-education of the Uyghur.

Re: China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

#380

Post by funkychicken »

bigglywiggler wrote: post #367

So many comments here by western people clinging to the only thing that they have left. The idea that somewhere in the world there is 'injustice' and a 'lack of freedom' and 'dictatorship' makes their absolute dystopian hellscape seem somewhat barely tolerable in their addled minds because they can at least imagine that elsewhere there is some big bad dictator and therefore they are comparatively free. No matter that…

Pretty sure most rational western people (on here at least) are the first to acknowledge all the bad things going on in their countries… and most of the comments I’ve read in this thread seem rather supportive of corruption crackdowns? Idk what prompted this rant tbh.
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