>Keep this in mind anytime a leader in a country with a high rate of corruption says he sincerely wants to clean things up, but those lower down are stopping hi

>Keep this in mind anytime a leader in a country with a high rate of corruption says he sincerely wants to clean things up, but those lower down are stopping him from doing so. He is just plain telling a lie. Doesn't this kind of contradict what you said before, though? The leader needs to allow corruption lest he is overthrown (usually by those lower down such as the military, not the public), so in essence those lower down are preventing him from cleaning up. There really is no winning here - being a leader means pandering to the people below you, because if you don't they can just get rid of you. In a democracy this problem is partly solved by switching leaders often and dividing the power of the underlings over the entire population, but the dynamic still very much exists. And of course, in a country with no democracy it's many times worse (and very difficult to establish a democracy). Don't automatically assume that dictators always have bad intentions - they are trapped in a system too. Of course that doesn't mean that China isn't doing a bad thing here, I was just speaking generally.