A key reason why China has, for decades, had the highest annual increases in per-capita GDP PPP (standard of living as experienced by the country’s population — as opposed to pure per-capita GDP, which reflects ONLY the investors) is the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless war against corruption.

by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

For example, on December 26th, the South China Morning Post headlined “Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign: China vows to keep up the fight” after record number of ‘tigers’ caught in corruption net: Politburo agrees to push forward campaign and calls for graft-busters to provide ‘guarantee’ for nation’s economic and social development”, and reported:

China’s ruling Communist Party has vowed to keep up efforts to fight corruption next year after a record 63 high-ranking officials – known as “tigers” – were placed under investigation on suspicion of graft in 2025.

During a meeting on Thursday, top decision-making body the Politburo also discussed a plan to improve conduct within the party, strengthen integrity and combat graft, official news agency Xinhua reported.

It said officials at the meeting had agreed to “resolutely push forward the fight against corruption, not stopping for a moment, not yielding an inch, and [to] deepen the comprehensive approach to addressing both the symptoms and root causes [of corruption]”.

The Politburo also called for the party’s discipline inspection and supervision bodies to push ahead next year with “higher standards and more effective measures” to provide a strong “guarantee” for China’s economic and social development in the five years to 2030. …

They heard a work report for 2025 from the top discipline and anti-corruption bodies, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission, Xinhua said. …

The pledge to continue long-running efforts to combat corruption in China came a day after the CCDI announced that Wang Jun, a former deputy disciplinary chief in Tibet, had been detained.

Wang, who was also deputy director of Tibet’s regional legislature, became the 63rd tiger to be placed under investigation for corruption this year.

That is a new record since Xi launched the sweeping anti-corruption campaign in 2013. This year’s figure is about 9 per cent higher than the 58 senior officials caught in the corruption net last year, which was also a record high.

These “tigers” are among the country’s so-called centrally managed cadres that are usually ranked at the deputy ministerial level or above. Some hold slightly lower ranks but occupy key positions in important sectors.

They are directly managed by the party’s Central Organisation Department, its top personnel body, and face top-level investigation by the CCDI if they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Dozens of top Chinese generals have also been removed this year in an ongoing crackdown on corruption in the military.

Among the most high-profile dismissals were He Weidong, a former Central Military Commission vice-chairman and a member of the Politburo, and Miao Hua, who was the ideology and personnel chief of the People’s Liberation Army.

Former Chinese senior banker Bai Tianhui executed for taking US$155 million in bribes

Separately, the CCDI on Wednesday released new guidelines for its investigators on obtaining and securing evidence.

A report on the CCDI website said the guidelines covered more than 20 types of corruption with a focus on “new and hidden forms” and they outlined key points for evidence collection and clarified evidentiary standards based on the elements of a crime.

The CCDI said it had sought feedback on the guidelines from legislative and judicial bodies.

In April, the graft-buster said corruption had become more sophisticated in recent years, with officials involved finding new ways to stay out of view.

That included waiting until after they had retired to receive bribes, and “revolving door” arrangements where officials used their knowledge for personal gain.

That same day, the American ‘news’-medium or propaganda agency Semafor headlined “China’s record graft crackdown” and opened with a seemingly informative graph marking each nation’s dot at its intersection between “GDP per capita” (the statistic that tells how good an economy is for investors) and the “Corruption perceptions index score” from Transparency International (TI). It showed China as being far more corrupt than the United States, and also being far lower GDP per capita than America is.

On 30 January 2024, I had headlined “Gallup Poll Confirms America’s Soaring Corruption”, and reported that,

Whereas the national corruption ratings of the various countries by the corrupt Transparency International organization, which was a spin-off from the U.S.-controlled World Bank in 1993 created by it so that countries whose leaders resist the demands by the U.S. Government will receive from TI poor corruption-ratings that scare away international investors and thereby starve their country of international capital and force up the interest-rates that those countries have to pay on their foreign debt, the people inside a given country — its own citizens there — have a much more realistic rating of their own country’s corruptness than do the hired outside ‘experts’ that TI selects to evaluate that in accord with TI’s vague criteria. Thus, the suite of Gallup polls that Gallup published on January 30th concerning Americans’ perceptions of “Honesty and Ethics” in America provides a far more accurate indication of the amount of corruptness in this country than TI’s score on this country does. So: here, I shall present the core from that Gallup article, and then will discuss it. …

Instead of the very opaque methodology of ranking that TI uses, which is based upon opinions by their selected panel of ‘experts’ to rate countries on their scale of countries’ transparency versus opaqueness, Gallup, on 18 October 2013, issued their polling-based study in which scientific random sampling of residents who were living in each country were asked to rate their own country, on the question “Is corruption widespread in your country, or not?” and that Gallup article was headlined “Government Corruption Viewed as Pervasive Worldwide”, and polled in and included 129 countries — but NOT China, perhaps because if China were to show as being the least corrupt, then Gallup’s income from the U.S.-and-allied billionaires’ corporations could plunge. Furthermore, only the data were being published by Gallup, no rankings that were based on them. That too would help protect Gallup from such possible blowback. In my article analysing those Gallup data, on 20 September 2020, I calculated and published the rankings based on those data, and my article on this was titled “Celebrating the Least Corrupt Country: Rwanda”. As I documented there, the Gallup rankings were extremely different from TI’s rankings, and the U.S. scored far better in the TI ranking than in the Gallup data. Of course, among other things, this means that the various nations’ bond-ratings, which depend largely upon TI’s ratings, significantly overstate the credit-worthiness of the U.S.Government.

On 5 August 09, I headlined “What is the world’s most corrupt country?”and opened:

Is it the country that corrupts the staff, the employees, of the U.N.? (No other country has the power to do that. This one does, and it takes full advantage of the opportunity, and carries out that corruption, ruthlessly.)

Is it the country that’s so corrupt at the very top, so that the model their aristocracy sets for their subjects to respect is so thoroughly rotten that this country has the world’s highest percentage of its people in prisons? If those prisoners are behind bars because they authentically should be, then that country is rotten at the bottom. But otherwise than that, there would have to be, above its bottom, at the level of the country’s entire criminal-justice system, a horrific amount of injustice, in order to place so many people behind bars, because this country’s having the world’s highest imprisonment-rate would then NOT reflect the prisoners’ extraordinary badness, but, instead, it would reflect the government’s extraordinary badness.

Though Gallup did not poll in China about this, two other major international polling organizations have polled there regarding closely related matters, and I wrote about this on 16 March 2023, headlining “How Nations’ Citizens Rate Their Own Government”. That presents the rankings from the international 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, which scientifically sampled 36,000+ people in 27 countries, and 1,150+ people in each, concerning “Trust in Government,” on which the highest, where 91% said they trust their Government, was in China; then “Trust in Media,” on which the highest, where 80% said they trust their media, was in China; then “Trust in Business,” on which the highest, where 84% said they trust their businesses, was in China; then “Trust in National Health Authorities,” on which the highest, where 93% likewise did, was in China. The U.S. scored considerably below average on each of those measures. My article closed with:

Furthermore, the Edelman polls aren’t the only ones which show that China’s Government is extraordinarily good. On 22 August 2022, I headlined “NATO-Affiliated Poll in 53 Countries Finds Chinese the Most Think Their Country Is a Democracy” and reported that, “A poll in 53 countries by the NATO-affiliated “Alliance of Democracies” found that 83% of Chinese think that China is a democracy. That’s the highest percentage amongst all of the 53 countries surveyed.” And, the “U.S. was worse than average, and was tied at #s 40&41, out of the 53 nations, with Colombia, at 49%” — barely less than half of Americans think they live in a democracy.

Perhaps one of the major reasons why China’s economy performs far better than America’s does is that whereas China’s Government continuously fights extremely hard against corruption, America’s doesn’t really fight against it but instead FOR it (and America’s first-ever billionaire President, Trump, famously exemplifies this), and leads it — that’s American-style ‘freedom’. It’s a very different model. To the extent that there are ideological differences between the U.S. and China, that might be the biggest one of them all.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/chinas-constantly-intense-anti-corruption-campaign/

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