A one-line Xinhua dispatch yesterday quoted unnamed officials within the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) as saying that Liu Tienan, the 58-year-old deputy director of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), was being investigated, but it gave no details.

Sources close to the matter said Liu was formally placed under investigation yesterday and that his home and office were searched by CCDI officials on Saturday night.

…

Liu’s case was first announced on December 6 on the microblog account of a deputy editor of news magazine Caijing. Luo Changping reported on his verified Sina Weibo account a series of allegations against Liu, including that he fabricated academic credentials, improperly profited from his position and kept a mistress.

…

Liu made several public appearances in the following couple of weeks, including at a national working conference on development and reform on December 18. However, a source familiar with the case told the Post that Liu had been barred since mid-December from attending official activities related to external affairs.

[Source]

Liu becomes the second vice-ministerial-level official to be targeted by new president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, after the deputy party secretary of Sichuan province was placed under investigation in December. The announcement did not mention any specific allegations against Liu, who served as director of the National Energy Administration (NEA) until being replaced in March.

The NEA’s press office initially had called the allegations against Liu as “pure slander,” according to Gillian Wong of the Associated Press. Luo Changping, the journalist who initiated a public campaign against Liu last year, told The New York Times that he believed the official allegations were related to his own:

“I know there’s a direct connection, but I can’t say any more,” Mr. Luo said in a telephone interview.

“I had felt panicky before because nothing was happening, but I’ve breathed a sigh of relief now that this has happened,” he said, referring to the inquiry.

[Source]

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One question while reading your book that struck me was this: was Bo Xilai an exceptional figure, an outlier? Or was he simply a part of the system and just happened to be the one who got caught?

In a way, both — he was an exceptional politician and a part of the system. On the one hand, he was a very charismatic populist and one of the more capable regional officials under Hu Jintao. The social and economic programs that he initiated in Chongqing brought tremendous changes to the city. On the other hand, he was also an egomaniac who mastered a high-profile, American-style campaign approach toward the media. He basically ran into trouble by taking on entrenched business interests in Chongqing and he used his nationally-known anti-crime campaign to persecute political opponents and business people who refused to cooperate with him. Basically, his ruthless ambition and the excesses of his anti-crime campaign were seen as a threat by senior leaders in Beijing. They felt they had to get rid of this politician because he could jeopardize their own political and economic interest if he was allowed to enter the Politburo Standing Committee. The Neil Heywood murder case provided Bo’s opponents with the perfect weapon to shoot him down.

Ultimately, there aren’t really any liberals in the Chinese political system.
Bo wasn’t the first one to fall — look at [former Beijing Party Secretary] Chen Xitong and [former Shanghai Party Secretary] Chen Liangyu, for example — and he won’t be the last either. There’s a leadership transition every five years, with a big one every ten years, and without transparency and fair competition, more power struggles will occur and another Bo Xilai will emerge.

Read Howard French’s review of Huang’s book.

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Liu faces either a lengthy jail sentence or possibly death. How severely he is dealt with will be an indicator of how seriously new Chinese President Xi Jinping Xi takes his fight on corruption, one of the pillars of his new administration

Liu “practiced favoritism and carried out malpractice, misused his power and caused big losses to public property and the interests of the state and the people”, the official Xinhua news agency said.

“The second intermediate Beijing court has already accepted the bribery and misuse of power case in accordance with the law and will chose a date for a trial,” the news agency said.

“As a worker for the state, Liu Zhijun used his position to help others seek gain, illegally accepted wealth and assets from other people. The numbers involved were huge and the circumstances very serious,” Xinhua added.

Read more about corruption in the Ministry of Railways in an article by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, via CDT.

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“Corruption and the reputation of our government are as incompatible as fire and water,” Mr. Li told reporters at the Great Hall of the People.

Speaking on the final day of the legislative session that installed a new generation of leaders, Mr. Li vowed to ease impediments to private investment, rein in the powerful interests that dominate large sectors of the economy and scale back an unwieldy, intrusive bureaucracy that he acknowledged often frustrated entrepreneurs and citizens.

The new government, led by President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, will impose a moratorium on the construction of government buildings and reduce spending on official vehicles, public meetings and overseas travel, Mr. Li said. The government’s sprawling work force, he warned, would be trimmed to increase spending on social welfare.

“Reforming is about curbing government power,” he said in his opening remarks, which were broadcast live on television. “It is a self-imposed revolution that will require real sacrifice, and it will be painful.”

Specifically, Li mentioned the problems that accompany China’s rapid urbanization, according to the South China Morning Post:

“Urbanisation will usher in a huge amount of consumption and investment demand, increase job opportunities, create wealth for farmers and bring benefits to the people,” said Li, who began exploring the topic as a doctoral student at Peking University.

But he also cautioned that it was also a “complex systemic project” that must be bolstered with various reforms.

In carrying out the project, the government would have to consider the different stages of development between cities and regions, he said.

“Urbanisation is not about building big, sprawling cities,” he said. “We should aim to avoid the typical urban malady where skyscrapers coexist with shanty towns.”

Li also discussed ways to free up the market in China to allow businesses more leeway to operate. From the Wall Street Journal:

The 57-year-old Mr. Li also said the government should give markets greater room to operate, including allowing private businesses to compete on an equal footing with state-owned enterprises. In finance, the market would play a greater role in setting interest rates and the exchange rate, and companies would have greater access to funding through the bond and equity markets, he said.

“Talking the talk is not as good as walking the walk,” he said. “We need to pursue market-oriented reforms.”

The premier’s annual news conference is the only time the Chinese public gets to see the leader who steers the world’s second largest economy being quizzed by the media, even if the questions and answers are mostly scripted.

Mr. Wen had sought to portray an avuncular man-of-the-people image, although he had a somewhat stiff manner on the podium. Mr. Li has a more informal style, and a down-to-earth delivery that resonated on China’s social networks, where many noted his absence of official airs.

Some observers have noted that Li’s targets for reform are less ambitious, but more specific, than those of his predecessor, Wen Jiabao. From the Financial Times:

The key question is not whether a Chinese leader is a reformer – but rather what kind of reformer he or she is.

The contrast between Mr Li’s programme and that of Wen Jiabao, his predecessor, is illuminating. Mr Li’s agenda, which he outlined at the end of China’s annual parliament on Sunday, is more limited and more singular in its focus on economics. It also appears to be more concrete and therefore more achievable.

Overall, Li’s style is more direct and less florid than Wen Jiabao’s, and received mixed reviews, according to the South China Morning Post:

The performance gained Li mixed reviews among critics and internet users, with some saying that they preferred his down-to-earth manner to Wen’s more florid style, while others said Li’s remarks were “flat” and avoided touching on sensitive issues.

Li kicked off the two-hour press conference by vowing that he would remain loyal to the constitution.

He also did not recite any classical Chinese works, which Wen often referenced to describe his personal feelings.

The most notable remark by Li in summing up his philosophy was: “Follow the great way, put the people first and benefit everyone.” It is a line he said he has learned through life experience.

Read also:
“Profile: Li Keqiang: a reform-minded premier” from Xinhua and “Li sets out strategic mission for next 5 years” from China Daily.

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The Bloomberg stories cited by Long Island University, which oversees the awards, include investigative reports looking into the family wealth of disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai and incoming president Xi Jinping. The New York Times reports, by David Barboza, examined the financial connections between “princelings” and their extended families. One report looked into the vast wealth obtained by relatives of outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao.

The CBS series reported on activist Chen Guangcheng, during the time he was held under house arrest in Linyi, Shandong, and after his escape to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

From the New York Times:

In a series of articles, Bloomberg examined the wealth accumulated by Bo Xilai, who was the leader of China’s sprawling Chongqing municipality before being ousted in a scandal that erupted over the murder of a British businessman. The series discovered a web of assets stretching from Beijing to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million. The series also revealed how relatives of Xi Jinping enriched themselves.

Mr. Barboza’s three-part report in The Times, “Princelings,” examined the financial interests of high-ranking Chinese officials and their families. The articles showed that relatives of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had accumulated a fortune of $2.7 billion.

The award for television reporting went to journalists from CBS News for their work uncovering human rights abuses in China. The correspondent Holly Williams and the cameraman Andrew Portch were recognized for their coverage of the human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who fled China after years of being under house arrest for his work exposing how some Chinese women were forced to have abortions in order to comply with the country’s one-child policy.

After the stories were published, both the Bloomberg and New York Times’ sites were blocked in China. Later, the New York Times (along with the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post) revealed that their site had been hacked, with David Barboza’s email communications the apparent target.

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A statement issued by the meeting, reported by CCTV, said some party organs were not strict when enlisting members and the quality of new recruits needed to be looked at. Meanwhile, some party members were corrupt and not disciplined.

[...] ”The overall number of party members should be controlled, and the membership structure and quality should be optimised in order to let them play their role,” the statement said.

[...] ”Unqualified party members will be handled in a timely manner and the management of floating party members, those who do not work or live in places where their membership is registered and cannot regularly attend party activities, should be strengthened,” the statement said.

Following the statement, some Chinese political watchers  are calling for stricter Party recruitment standards for new members and harsher punishment for corrupt officials. From Yang Jinghao at Global Times:

Cai Xia, a professor of Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, told the Global Times that the meeting showed that the Party leadership has fully realized the problems existing among Party members and its determination to administer the Party strictly.

[...] Cai Zhiqiang, a professor of Party building with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said the CPC’s large size had inevitably brought many management challenges for the Party, considering the increasingly complicated domestic and international situations and diversified values and interests in the new era.

[...] ”The punishment of unqualified members should also be strictly in line with the Party regulations,” said Cai Zhiqiang. In May 2012, 102 Party members were expelled for poor work performances or violations of family planning policy. The cleanout was regarded as a landmark example of Party membership adjustment.

Just this week, yet another corruption investigation of a high-ranking official, Li Jianguo, once again demonstrates resolution on this issue from the top and a thirst for justice from the general public. From Celia Hatton at BBC:

Mr Li, who serves as vice chairman of China’s parliament, reportedly engineered the promotion of his nephew to a plum government position.

[...] Just last week, Mr Xi promised he would battle both “tigers” and “flies”, indicating that officials at all ranks were under scrutiny.

Li Xinde, an influential citizen journalist, was the first person to interview the whistleblower exposing Li Jianguo’s high-flying nephew. The fact that this case has been picked up by the authorities, he says, shows that things are changing in China.

[...] All evidence, he says, that individual citizens are no longer working alone to expose corruption on a case-by-case basis. Instead, there is new hope that the system as a whole is becoming more transparent.

See more on Xi Jinping and anti-corruption work via CDT.

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Xi, in comments carried by the official Xinhua news agency, said it was just as important to go after the “flies”, or lowly people, as it was to tackle the “tigers”, or top officials, in the battle against graft.

“We must uphold the fighting of tigers and flies at the same time, resolutely investigating law-breaking cases of leading officials and also earnestly resolving the unhealthy tendencies and corruption problems which happen all around people,” he said.

Bureaucrats must not be allowed to get away with skirting rules and orders from above or choosing selectively which policies to follow, added Xi.

“The style in which you work is no small matter, and if we don’t redress unhealthy tendencies and allow them to develop, it will be like putting up a wall between our party and the people, and we will lose our roots, our lifeblood and our strength,” Xi told a meeting of the party’s top anti-graft body.

Xinhua has more on Xi’s comments:

Xi said “the mainstream of our cadres and Party members is good. But we should soberly recognize that corruption is still prone to occur or happen quite frequently in certain areas.”

He added that some major law violation cases have had a negative impact and the anti-corruption situation is still severe.

He stressed that the fight against corruption is a long-term, complicated and arduous task. Anti-corruption efforts must be consistent and will never slacken.

“We must have the resolve to fight every corrupt phenomenon, punish every corrupt official and constantly eliminate the soil which breeds corruption, so as to earn people’s trust with actual results,” he said.

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Lawyer Li Guifang said he and colleague Wang Zhaofeng of the DeHeng Law Offices will represent Bo.

“The case is still being investigated … an indictment has not yet been issued,” Li said. He declined to answer further questions.

…

DeHeng is well-known in the Chinese legal community as one of the country’s largest firms, with branches in major mainland cities and overseas.

On its website, the firm says it has had good relations with large state enterprises and government departments, providing legal services in projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and acting as advisers to the finance and health ministries.

The firm also enjoys favourable standing with the party leadership: the newly appointed party leader, Xi Jinping , visited the firm’s office in Beijing in 2010 and praised its efforts in promoting party ideology within its ranks, according to a report by the official Xinhua News Agency at the time.

The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips noted last week that one of the lawyers, Li Guifang, spent time studying in the UK in 1989:

Colleagues describe Mr Bo’s lawyer as one of China’s best. Li Guifang is the deputy director of the Criminal Law Committee of the Chinese Bar Association and an expert in “economic crimes”, according to his official profile.

Read more about Bo Xilai via CDT.

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While the report hinted that Mr Bo’s day in court could be approaching, Xinhua failed to give a date or location for the trial or any further details.

Online, there was speculation that the announcement was simply a ruse to divert media attention from an ongoing row over press freedom that has now seen three days of protests in southeast China.

However, Willy Lam, a politics expert from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said Mr Bo’s trial could well be held in February.

“I think there are good reasons to wrap it up before the National People’s Congress [NPC] in March,” he said. “I think there is a good chance the judicial process will begin, perhaps after the Chinese New Year. They don’t want the Bo case to be a distraction at the NPC and I think they have already collected enough evidence.” Mr Bo, the former party chief of Chongqing, was toppled from power in early 2012 in the aftermath of the mysterious death of British businessman Neil Heywood.

The government announced a criminal investigation into alleged wrongdoing by Bo in September, before the Party leadership transition in November, but there has been no information about Bo’s case since then. From the Hindu:

With the CPC completing its once-in-a-decade leadership change at its November Party Congress, the case against Mr. Bo was put on the back-burner: the purge of the leader had embarrassed the party — lifting the veil on the abuses of power and rampant corruption in its highest ranks — only weeks before the transfer of power to the party’s fifth generation of leaders. Mr. Bo, the son of a once powerful conservative Party elder, Bo Yibo, was seen as having allies who had ties to his father and had supporters on the Left.

In the first indication since the Party Congress that the trial of Mr. Bo may be imminent, the official Xinhua news agency said in a report on Wednesday that the “serious law violation case” involving Mr. Bo had been transferred “to judicial organs”. The report did not give a date for the trial, which is expected to take place in Beijing.

The report, quoting Central Committee of Discipline Inspection spokesman Cui Shaopeng, added that “a total of 4,698 county-level cadres or higher-level cadres were punished by CPC’s discipline watchdogs in 2012 and 961 cadres at county-level or above have been transferred to judicial organs”.

Read more about Bo Xilai and Liu Zhijun via CDT.

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In China, Andersen’s story (long familiar to Chinese) is now being re-enacted inside out. The emperors, the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, are party to the swindle. And the audacious act of deception is to convince the townsfolk that despite all outward appearances, Party leaders are not mantled with wealth and privilege — they are, in fact, naked.

Since he became General Secretary in November, Xi Jinping has made an extreme public relations makeover the centerpiece of his game plan. He wants to convince Chinese that the CCP’s fifth generation of leaders is down-to-earth, spurns ostentation, that it is engaged with the pocketbook concerns of the general population — but most of all that it is clean.

Corruption is a major, life-and-death issue for China’s ruling Party, and this is not the time for the Party be seen, like the emperor in Anderson’s story, wearing “the finest silk and the purest gold thread.”

Of course, the term “naked officials” has another meaning which brings to mind exactly the wealth and privilege that the leaders are trying to publicly disown.

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“The anticorruption storm has begun,” People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, wrote on its Web site this month.

The flurry of revelations suggests that members of China’s new leadership may be more serious than their predecessors about trying to tame the cronyism, bribery and debauchery that afflict state-run companies and local governments, right down to the outwardly dowdy neighborhood committees that oversee sanitation. Efforts began just days after Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Communist Party chief and China’s incoming president, warned that failing to curb corruption could put the party’s grip on power at risk.

“Something has shifted,” said Zhu Ruifeng, a Beijing journalist who has exposed more than a hundred cases of alleged corruption on his Web site, including the lurid exertions of Mr. Lei [Zhengfu]. “In the past, it might take 10 days for an official involved in a sex scandal to lose his job. This time he was gone in 66 hours.”

The “astonishingly ranine” Lei took a starring role in Evan Osnos’ survey of the recent string of sex scandals at The New Yorker (via CDT).

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In the first official report on Xi’s southern tour, Xinhua said Xi met local officials and business chiefs from state-owned and private companies and stressed that the restructuring of the economy “admits no delay” if China is not to lose out internationally. Xinhua did not mention other activities on Xi’s southern tour.

Xi was quoted as saing: “We should acknowledge the economic and social achievements we have made so far this year and recognise the long-term fundamentals will remain sound … meanwhile, we should recognise that adverse domestic and overseas effects will be long-term, complicated and winding. We should not run from conflicts and cover up problems.”

Xinhua said Xi interacted intensively with those at the meeting, who raised problems with tax, financial and land policies, the bleak trade outlook and difficulties faced by small businesses. He also told them not to read from prepared scripts.

The New York Times looks at the importance and potential impact of the Shenzhen trip:

Mr. Xi, known as a skillful consensus builder, has kept his ideas carefully veiled throughout his career, but his trip to Shenzhen is the strongest sign yet that he may favor more open policies. In a speech in Beijing on Nov. 29, Mr. Xi spoke of the “Chinese dream” of realizing the nation’s “revival,” which, besides being a call for renewal, also signaled strong nationalist leanings.

Mr. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revered senior official handpicked by Mr. Deng to help shape the new economic policies and oversee the creation of the Shenzhen zone. Mr. Xi’s mother lives in Shenzhen, and he visited her on his trip, according to Hong Kong news reports.

“If he indeed went to Shenzhen, that means he intends to make reform a subject of priority,” said Li Weidong, a liberal political analyst. “That would really be a phenomenon.”

Mr. Li cautioned, though, that the so-called reform policies that followed Mr. Deng’s 1992 southern tour, in his view, “ended up being fake” because China’s boom resulted in widespread corruption and the expansion of state enterprises at the expense of private entrepreneurship.

Corruption is indeed the major challenge facing the new Xi administration, which he has confronted so far by requiring simpler and humbler government. For the Council on Foreign Relations, Elizabeth Economy looks at three other strategies Xi and his colleagues may take to try to curb official excesses.

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The official, Li Chuncheng, 56, did not attend an important provincial Communist Party gathering on Tuesday and has not been seen in public since Nov. 19, the official Xinhua news agency said, without saying whether he had been detained. Although not on a career track that would be likely to take him to the highest echelons of the Chinese government, he was named at the party congress as one of 171 alternate members of the Central Committee; there are 205 full members.

Communist Party officials like Mr. Li face a sometimes harsh investigative process that is separate from the country’s judicial system, although party investigations can often lead to prosecution by the judiciary as well. Xinhua deleted its article about Mr. Li from its Web site early Wednesday afternoon, possibly a sign that public release of the announcement had not been fully vetted.

The investigation of Mr. Li comes as Xi Jinping, the new general secretary of the Communist Party, is trying to make an anticorruption campaign one of the first hallmarks of his tenure. Mr. Xi emphasized the fight against corruption in his inaugural address after taking office on Nov. 15, and in his first speech to the Politburo he warned that failing to act against corruption would “doom the party and the state.”

Reuters reports that official Chinese media announced the investigation before taking reports down:

Sichuan party authorities announced the investigation on Monday and Li did not appear as scheduled at a propaganda meeting on Tuesday, the media said.

However, by early afternoon the Youth Daily and Xinhua websites had deleted their reports on Li without explanation. Calls to the Sichuan government seeking comment went unanswered.

The South China Morning Post looks at Li’s background and political rise:

From the 1970s to 1998, Li spent most of his time in Harbin , Heilongjiang , first as a student and then in various positions, including deputy chief of the city’s branch of the Communist Youth League and deputy mayor.

He was appointed deputy mayor of Chengdu , Sichuan’s provincial capital, in 1998, and promoted to mayor in 2001. Four years later, he was named party chief of Chengdu. He became the province’s deputy party chief in September last year. He was regarded as a key architect of Chengdu’s building boom, and dismayed Premier Wen Jiabao with a vanity project in 2008, after the province was hit by a massive earthquake.

Staff began moving into a new city government headquarters, which reportedly cost more than US$176 million, following the earthquake. Wen visited the headquarters after travelling to the quake-hit area, but left “in disgust, having spent less than three minutes in it”, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last year.

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So how, exactly, do you crack down on corruption in China?

Li Chengyan, a professor at Peking University’s Research Center for Government Integrity, has an idea: Involve the mistresses. No, seriously. A staunch party loyalist, he is researching the role of kept women, or ernai, as whistleblowers, intentionally or otherwise. “The phenomenon of mistresses is so common in Chinese history, but the scale today is really unprecedented,” says Li, who thinks the problem is caused by loopholes in the discipline system and lack of effective supervision. “If we examine corrupt officials, about 80 to 90 percent of them also have mistresses.”

Li sees a connection between China’s modern concubine culture and its runaway graft: the “emperor psychology” of the unrestrained: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. When officials have absolute power, they become bold to ignore the law and social norms and do everything they like.” This ultimately hurts the party: “It’s misleading to think that keeping a mistress is not a big problem — that it won’t affect the official’s main work, records, and achievements. Temptation brings temptation.”

But where others see moral hazard, Li also sees a silver lining. “Many corruption investigations begin with information or lawsuits from the mistresses. Why not? They have direct knowledge of the officials’ behavior.” Eleven mistresses of a Shaanxi province official — many of them wives of his subordinates — exposed his dealings in 2007 after their families stopped prospering. The mistress of a former Navy vice-admiral ratted him out in 2006 after he rebuffed demands for continued financial support for her and their secret love child. “She wanted compensation to buy a house and raise the kid as a condition to end the relationship,” says Li. “Changes in relationship status always produce unstable results.”

Read more about corruption and mistresses in China, via CDT.

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“Leading officials at all levels, especially high-ranking officials, must readily observe the code of conduct on clean governance and report all important matters,” Hu said in a keynote speech at the opening of the CPC’s 18th National Congress.

“They should both exercise strict self-discipline and strengthen education and supervision over their families and their staff; and they should never seek any privilege,” Hu said.

However, Hu offered no specifics about how the Party could carry out such reforms. Forcing officials to declare their assets is one potential method. Two up and coming officials, Guangdong’s Wang Yang and Shanghai’s Yu Zhengsheng, both of whom are vying for a position on the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, told foreign journalists at the Party Congress that they are open to the idea. From Reuters:

The comments by Wang Yang, party boss of Guangdong province, and Yu Zhengsheng, Shanghai’s Communist chief, come at a time of heightened sensitivity about the wealth of China’s top leaders on the eve of a once-a-decade leadership transition.

[...]

Official ostentation has become a hot-button issue on the Chinese Internet. One official was recently sacked and put under investigation after web surfers compiled pictures of him wearing several different luxury watches.

Wang said Guangdong was “exploring” ways to compel officials of the fast-developing province to declare their assets.

“I believe that we Chinese officials will make public our assets step by step in line with central provisions,” said Wang, who some political observers believe is a contender for a spot in the elite Politburo Standing Committee next week.

AP explains why Wang Yang’s views may carry some weight:

Wang’s views matter. An ally of Hu’s from their days 30 years ago in the Communist Youth League, Wang has gone on to forge credentials as a reformer. In Guangdong, he has tried to guide the economy away from labor-intensive assembly-line processing and enacted more tolerant rules for environmental and other local activist groups that the party has mostly tried to suppress.

Wang has been considered a candidate for the new leadership, the Politburo Standing Committee, though party-connected scholars say his policies and popularity have brought a pushback from conservatives, diminishing his chances.

“All party members are reformers,” Wang told reporters Friday, brushing off a question about his prospects. “The report clearly states the goal of the party congress is to liberate thoughts, reform and open up, rally efforts and overcome obstacles. This will not change.”

On corruption, however, the party has been in need of new thinking. The party, which controls courts, police and prosecutors, has proved feeble in policing itself yet does not want to undermine its control by empowering an independent body to do so. Some officials have been required to report income, real estate holdings and other wealth to their superiors since 2010, but the measure has done little to staunch the graft.

See also a Bloomberg investigation into the assets of the family of Xi Jinping, China’s incoming president, and a New York Times investigation into the family wealth of Premier Wen Jiabao (via CDT). Read more about high-level corruption in China.

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