In the wake of several recent corruption and sex scandals, a new round of the anti-corruption game has been launched. From Andrew Jacobs at The New York Times:
“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).
