China Argues Over How Much Corruption Is Best

The worst kept secret in contemporary China is the role that corruption plays in the function and disfunction of public life. Take, for example, Zhang Shuguang, the former deputy chief of engineering for China’s Railway Ministry.

In 2011, at the time of his arrest, state media briefly reported that he had $2.8 billion stashed away in foreign bank accounts . The scale of Zhang’s avarice was grand, but it differed only in scale from the documented acts committed by thousands of other Chinese public officials every year. A few months after Zhang’s arrest, the People’s Bank of China (China’s Central Bank) posted a report –- subsequently deleted -– claiming that 16,000 to 18,000 public officials had fled China since the mid-1990s, taking with them $120 billion .