140,000 Chinese Officials Investigated for Corruption in 2011

According to official data, 140-thousand officials were investigated for corruption in China in 2011. Professor Hu Xingdou from the Beijing Institute of Technology says that based on the world’s average corruption level, 99 percent of the corruption in China goes unreported.

But China’s corruption level is above average. It's rated as highly corrupt by Transparency International, a global organization that investigates corruption.

Professor Zhang Tianliang from George Mason University says the regime is not really combating corruption, but actually encouraging it.

[Prof. Zhang Tianliang, George Mason University]:
“Because of this type of corruption, you can’t say that a certain official has a problem with his morals, or say that they have avoided punishment by the law. Actually this kind of corruption in encouraged by the government, because the Communist regime needs a group of people to protect its political authority. So what kind of people can protect this authority? They are precisely the group who are benefitting from it.”

Liu Kaiming from the Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Observation says there are ways the Chinese regime could combat corruption if it really wanted to.

[Liu Kaiming, Shenzhen Institute of Contemporary Observation]:
“Actually, there are many opinions among people, what is more there are many developed methods of handling (corruption) in the world. For example recently government of Macao SAR announced, every official, especially high-level officials, must publically declare personal property, unless they are deceased. So, how do you prove your determination to act? It’s very simple, declare official property.”

Corruption is an endemic problem in China, with public officials and managers of state-owned enterprises having stolen an estimated $123-billion since 1990.