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

mothballed

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

Wonder who this guy pissed off in the CCP.

onion2k

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.

TrackerFF

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?

1970-01-01

I wonder if he could have lived if it was just one $325M bribe and not 30 years of bribery.

varispeed

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.

feverzsj

A relatively low level official can't take this much bribes. More like a scapegoat.

jqpabc123

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.

rirze

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.

dfee

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.

engineer_22

We should do this in USA

groby_b

Good for China. Society cannot work with too many corrupt civil servants. Yes, "autocrats", "civil liberties", and yet - the guy slurped up $325M to put his finger on the scale, not to change the model of governance. I wish we in the west took corruption more seriously, but I suppose we're more interested in cage fights on the lawn these days.

carabiner

The US is very good if you're very rich. It's bad for everyone else. China appears to be somewhat bad or critical of the superrich, which is why they want to come to the US, but good if you're middle class or poor.

Danox

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 something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face. You might as well go jump off a building or a bridge cause you’re done for. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/china-executes-ex... https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uvm7oy/i...

pibaker

Anyone who think this demonstrates the CCP's epicbacon commitment to anti corruption needs to ask themselves how did this man take so much bribe over 30 years and is only sentenced now. Is he dumb? Surely he is smart enough to know he committed a capital crime and yet he kept doing it. Perhaps he only kept doing it because he believed he could somehow get away with it? Perhaps he saw others pull off the same stunt? Or perhaps he had the political capital to keep himself out of trouble and is now facing justice because he rubbed someone higher up the wrong way? Is the prosecution dumb? 300 million is no small money are they really so incompetent that over the course of 30 years they could not find anything wrong with this guy? Perhaps they had a reason to keep him around? Perhaps he had them in his pocket? Perhaps he had the connection to fuck up anyone who dares investigating him? Perhaps they never meant to care about corruption anyway and only went after him because someone somewhere issued an order and they are just charging him for corruption because the true reason is less convenient? China has invested a lot in whitewashing its public image these days. Every young left leaning westerner is salivating at the idea of a Chinese century because they somehow convinced themselves that the Chinese has the solution to everything that went wrong in the west. It's sad to see it spreading even to this website.

kdamica

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

dzonga

does punishing corruption with a death sentence - look excessive ? Yes! is it prone to abuse by those who yield power - Yes! however - the alternative - where corruption goes unchecked is even worse!! if you come from a poor country e.g in Africa - you would've experienced the effects of corruption. American are now experiencing it now - & the country is already worse off. though before corruption in American was used as an incentive mechanism - now it's just pure grift. so yeah sentencing one or two people to death explicitly is the humane outcome vs sentencing thousands to death implicitly.

mandeepj

Will it happen here to the most corrupt a-hole? I don't think so. He'd chant - they hate me , or i'm part of a witch hunt , or 'i'm politically prosecuted .

riazrizvi

Fascinating development in Chinese politics.

niemandhier

There is the concept of sending doubles to stand in for punishment in china. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding_zui