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Corruption in China growing at least as fast as the economy

Melbourne Age - January 9, 2010

John Garnaut, Beijing – Last weekend a mid-ranking police officer in Shenzhen named Liu Shengqiang invited 1100 guests to a five-star hotel for his daughter's wedding banquet.

The 500,000 yuan ($A79,500) price tag probably amounted to several years' salary, although he did make a 36,000 yuan return from "red envelopes" – guests giving cash as gifts.

"I played low-profile, without inviting any leaders from the bureau," Mr Liu told the Southern Metropolis Daily. "If you were in my position, you would understand," he said. "We have a lot of neighbours."

Mr Liu's plea for empathy did not go unheeded. Chinese officials can indeed be bound in complex webs of social and official obligations. They are often expected to throw extravagant banquets and finance them by blurring official and "grey" income on the side.

"Don't panic! It's common in Shenzhen to spend hundreds of thousand on weddings," wrote one netizen. "Here, if you don't have assets of more than 10 million you are considered a have-not."

The reason Mr Liu's banquet for his daughter's wedding drew any attention at all was that just one week earlier a deputy police chief had been fired in the same city for the same offence: throwing a housewarming party for 1000 guests and accepting money.

The line between ordinary business and corruption in China can seem rather arbitrary.

A Horizon Research Consultancy survey of 1350 people in major Chinese cities said this week that corruption ranked as the single worst blot on China's international image, for the third year running.

And the Communist Party knows it has a major problem, judging by the rolling campaigns of the past three weeks.

At the end of last year President Hu Jintao convened a Politburo meeting to chart this year's corruption fight and display the party's "superior morality", according to the official Chinese newsagency Xinhua, while the National Audit Office said that $A40 billion had been embezzled or misused in 2009.

On Thursday the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – an opaque non-judicial body that deals with corruption inside the party – said it was launching a blitz against bribery and siphoning income at state-owned enterprises.

The previous day the state media loudly publicised a report showing how many senior officials and executives had been caught with their hands in the till, and worse, and detailed the harsh punishments they received.

Another report said more than 2000 party cadres had been punished for corruption last year.

One of the biggest scalps last year was the head of China National Nuclear Corporation, Kang Rixin, whose sprawling commercial and regulatory empire is responsible for the entire civilian and military nuclear production chain. But corruption is not confined, of course, to the top of China's rapidly expanding nuclear system.

In 2007 a village chief in Hunan province showed The Age a bag of uranium ore that he had illegally dug from an abandoned mine, and said he needed millions of yuan to bribe local county officials in order to restart his smuggling enterprise.

The amount of corruption in China is impossible to gauge. But despite the repeated crackdowns and publicity, the problem appears to be growing at least as fast as the Chinese economy.

Transparency International's 2009 corruption perception index ranked China at 79 of 180 countries, a worse result than the previous year (72) and far worse than the 57 recorded in 2001.

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