Following the indictment last week of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos compares political corruption in China and the U.S.:
If you go back and forth between China and the U.S. these days, you’re often asked whether political corruption in the former is really that much worse than it is the latter. Neither country is a standard bearer for clean governance (for that, visit Denmark or New Zealand), but, strictly speaking, the countries are far apart. In its most recent annual index of perceptions of corruption in a hundred and seventy-seven countries, Transparency International ranked the United States at No. 19; China came in at No. 80. (Somalia, North Korea, and Afghanistan tied for last place.) And, yet, the McDonnells’ case provides an unusually acute opportunity for a comparison that might give Americans reasons to be both comforted and unnerved. [Source]
See more on corruption in China via CDT.
