As newly appointed president Xi Jinping vows to crackdown on corruption in all levels of party power, NPR’s All Things Considered reports on official posts for sale in China:
Consider the case of Huang Yubiao, a Chinese real estate millionaire with a charitable streak. He was seen on local television promising poverty-stricken villagers, “I’ll give you whatever you need.”
But his failed attempt to buy a seat on the Hunan Province People’s Congress turned him into a whistle-blower. Online, he went public, admitting that he’d given out approximately $50,000 worth of bribes to about 320 members of the Shaoyang City People’s Congress in his bid to become a provincial delegate.
“Everyone was doing it,” he told NPR in a telephone interview. “My bribes were the lowest, so I wasn’t elected. They asked me to add money, but I didn’t. They told me I couldn’t be elected as I only paid $160 a head. It needed to be higher, maybe even triple that.”
[…]”Everything’s for sale,” says historian Zhang Lifan, noting that China has a 2,000-year history of buying and selling posts in the bureaucracy. “Some people don’t even use cash. I know that people who want to be legislators can just give an antique or a voucher to whoever is in charge, or even help their family members to go overseas to study. There are all kinds of transactions.”
Click through to read the full report and listen to the broadcast.
Also see prior CDT coverage of corruption and the newly appointed CCP administration’s plan to eradicate it.
