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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

This story makes me want to tell one of my own. I have visited the PRC a few times. On one of those times, my wife and I visited a cousin of hers in Beijing. This cousin had a factory and was well connected. He wanted us to do something for him, so he invited us to drinks and dinner at a fine restaurant (in a private banquet room). Turns out that one of his buddies was the Chief of Police and he was there too. We had fun trying to drink each other under the table, and as the evening came to a close I slipped downstairs so that I could pay for everything. (I didn't want to be obligated to any of these people.) When I approached the restaurant staff and expressed my intention to pay, they were horror stricken. Apparently the Police Chief was sponsoring the meal, which means the restaurant was giving it to him and everyone else for "free". I had not truly realized the extent of corruption in China until that moment.

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In India this is so common that it's not even considered any thing out of the usual, let alone cause a realization.

I have tons of personal anecdotes which would make this post a hell lot longer. But for feelers, these days your ordinary mid level bribe making government employee is worth around 500 crores. For the western readers, that is in the ball park of $60 to $70 million. Higher up the hierarchy, the assistants to ruling party ministers, top bureaucracy, district level administration, or head of government organizations average twice to thrice that easily. The politicians themselves are likely in the ballpark of a few billion dollars worth.

The bribe market in India is so hot, you need to pay bribes, to get posted to positions where you can make more bribe. There's an entire corruption economy. So immense that it would dwarf anything real you could make working hard. Most of these people have regular meets and hire top lawyers to work around legally. They also pay-up the hierarchy for protection.

By the way it's not just some evil cabals meeting underground. Parents explicitly aspire their kids get these jobs. People spend bulk of their 20's just on entrance examinations, just for this.

The scale of corruption economy in India is just so mind boggling, it would be hard to explain any non-Indian just really how immense and all pervasive it is.

Your numbers seem wrong. I’m sure corruption is rampant but an “ordinary mid level bribe making government employee” being worth $60 to $70 million (more than CEOs of large US public companies) is impossible.

You have no idea, those numbers are true.

When it comes to illegal territory money the Forbes wealth lists are just a gigantic joke.

As a broad simplification, this is how the Roman Empire worked. Of course, in the Ronan Empire incentives were generally aligned, since the person doing the taxation also had to do the defending — if you were incompetent at the latter, you’d be dead soon enough.

The problem with this system in modern times is that incentives are unaligned to objectives.

Yes, so shocking to hear that considering how police in the rest of the world are known for their stellar reputation in the community.

It is interesting that the police chief has to pay for the dinner, I thought he was there for the free ride.

The police chief didn’t have to pay for the dinner, in the grandparent comment’s story.

In theory the free meal was on him, right? The rich business guy could easily pay for the meal out of his pocket, and the police chief actually choose to use his power (as suggested) to get a free dinner. I am not saying it is not true. Just stating the fact. Rather than doing nothing, he actually used his power for food.

Imagine what he wanted from the rich businessman that he wanted to pay or used his power for food.

There is no free lunch, might not be even for the restaurant people too. My guess is the restaurant people were having their own motivations why they allow them to eat for free.

In a corrupt society. Corruption begets corruption. Eventually money is just a means to trade things/services, if you have money going around that doesn't account for things/services, very likely there is tons of cheat/corrupt economy. Imagine this like a kind of inflation, on top of existing inflation.

The West tolerates corruption with one or two layers of indirection. Revolving door, speaking fees, campaign contributions, nonprofit donations. These kinds of corruption are not banned by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but direct graft is.

Corruption really interferes with the proper functioning of markets. Does indirection lessen the effect?

It would hard to imagine a society without corruption. But as an Indian, with my experience staying in California for a few years the overall corruption is just no way comparable to the Asian third world countries like India.

If US were to be as corrupt as India, imagine the DMV employees asking for a $500 bribe just for a State Id Card. Or asking for bribes for as little as a $50 bribe to even issue a form at the Social Security Office.

That's like just the beginning of it.

But this kind of direct corruption is so uncivilized. Look how shocked the civilized world is at this atrocious practice. Don't they know they can't maintain the facade of law abiding democratic society if they can't even hide their corruption properly.

Yeah, this was pretty much the norm. But these past 4 years, this kind of "using public money for private events" are much less common. There is much much tight curb on "dinners" "using government owned cars" "red pockets gifts". And there is a lot of auditing, approvals, and documentation for doing anything. Source: my cousin works in a governmental department. His co-worker was fired for hosting a expensive dinner for potential collaboration partner. Before, people wanted to get a government position for the "nice Perks". Nowadays, government position is no longer that "you can do whatever you want job". There are actually tons of rules for government jobs. Ex: My brother is not allowed to purchase a drink more than 8% alcohol content if the meal is sponsored by government money and there is amount cap per meal. He is mid ranked. And people can report evidence of corruption rules breaking so he is very careful with the rules.

Yep the introduction written by Jordan Schneider was really confusing and seemed to want to portray the crackdown by Xi solely as something to weed out dissidents. That might have been some part of it especially in high-profile cases, but in general the drive to crack down corruption and make the officialdom more service-minded is definitely genuine, and people have been taking positive note of this. A lot of previous officials have simply resigned and gone into the private sector in order to make more money as a result as well.

Yup. My sister in law is from, and lives, in a south-East Asian country and she had an interesting story.

She needed to register for her identity card so she went to her local police station and filled out the forms. Gets a call a week later - “oh sorry, one of the forms was filled out incorrectly, can you come back and fill it out again?”. Sure, no problem.

A week later “oh, one of the forms filled out was the wrong form. I have the right one now, can you come fill it out?”. Well this is silly, but ok.

A week later “it turns out you need a form from the district as well, please fill that out and bring it in”. This is stupid, but she does it.

A week later “oh, that form had the wrong stamp on it, you need to fill out a new form and get the right stamp”.

A this point it was obvious - she went to police station, explained that the stamp was the correct one and oh, yeah, by the way, I know you’re working hard so let me give you some coffee money ($10 USD in local currency).

She had the identity document the next day.

The article is not intended as a highlight of whatever sort of "corruption" of the political system though. I think the Substack author Jordan Schneider also somehow missed the point/misled with his introduction. It's intended more as an objective description of how the officialdom works, and how they should deepen the reforms based on such objective understandings. There are some interesting studies that compared levels of corruption between the US and China, especially during 19th century when US was still rapidly developing. Even now we all see how corrupt some US police/politicians in small places could be. I don't think the conclusion "I had not truly realized the extent of corruption in China until that moment." was a fair conclusion especially in the context of this article.

This exact scenario with police was prevalent in NYC and Los Angeles in prior times. It didn’t stop there, of course. Everything old is new again.

I personally experienced a modern anecdote of this while I worked for a public works project in northern CA. This project was estimated to bring a significant amount of economic activity to the area so we were all “bribed”.

Even now in the US it’s a lot about who you know.

That sounds different. In your case, they happily bribed the officials, to make more money later?

Compare with:

> When I approached the restaurant staff and expressed my intention to pay, they were horror stricken

Here they instead fear something bad would happen, if they don't pay (offer the food for free)?

Those at restaurants or whoever offered the meal are definitely not coerced, or under the impression of such.

if they sees him as the guest, it would be shocked to see he is asking to pay. The host of dinner won't be happy if they allow guests to pay. Part of culture. I won't read too much into it, especially in Beijing. Of course, in rural areas, the chief could be king. Still, many times they have to pay for the meals, the only difference is that they are allowed to have a tab. The corruption is not taking free meals from restaurants, it is actually using government funds to pay for these meals. He will go to jail if the restaurant owner reports him if he does not pay for many times.

I can imagine that It's far cheaper to make friend with the police chief by giving him a free meal. Just in case the restaurant need special attention from the chief for situations like local gangs ask for protection money(probably very rare) or fight with drunken eaters. You never know.

It's still norm to bribe local officials so they will go easy on the businesses, such as speedy things up when dealing with the local gov, not enforcing laws when the business wants to pay less taxes.. etc.

They were "horror stricken" because the guest asked to pay, which was something totally unimaginable in terms of Chinese customs (not to mention the guest was a foreigner), especially in 2001. If the host didn't pay for a meal he'd lose all his face for all future interactions. Don't know what impression the OP got out of it but it sounded like you/the OP got some misunderstanding out of it.

For Beijing, what you described above is highly unlikely to be true. Not saying such corruptions do not exist in Beijing, corruptions exist everywhere in places like Beijing, just pointing out that you won't be able to notice them like the way how you described.

You are basically suggesting that the restaurant intentionally let a first time visitor (you) who they didn't know & trust to know the special relationship they have with the "chief of police". Why would they do that? A revenge to get rid of the guy?

It is also pretty strange to have "chief of police" accepting such high risk and low value "free meal" as gift. As a corrupted official, will you feel comfortable walking into a restaurant fitted with security cameras to enjoy your "free meal"? Sounds like a failed IQ test to me.

This happened in 2001 when there was less surveillance. Although the hotel we were staying at (foreigners only) had cameras everywhere, including one on the ceiling just outside our door.

The restaurant staff did not betray any information to me. That is why they were horrified. It put them in a diffiuclt position. I assume that they would not accept my money because of the risk that it might flow back to the chief that I had paid.

Yep 2001 is pretty much night and day compared to how things work now. Not sure when was the last time you were in China but the impression you get would surely be very different.

Also I didn't totally understand your point, since the host paying for the meal is the only right thing to do in the Chinese culture. Of course, when it was in 2001, the police chief probably covered the meal using public money, if by corruption this is what you mean. (By no means would the restaurant be asked to just give out food for free.) As someone also pointed out, this has become much harder after Xi's crackdown on such spending.

My impression was that the Chief did not cover the meal at all, except through his influence. The restaurant was "gifting" the meal to him in exchange for something. Perhaps it was "protection", or perhaps it was a "get out of jail free" card related to other corruption.

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