9 ms·

The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge

by Danox 3mo ago

The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant that was one of the largest industrial catastrophes in the world let alone China. If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face. You might as well go jump off a building or a bridge cause you’re done for. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/china-executes-ex-head-food-drug-agency-flna1c9470728 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/china-executes-ex... https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uvm7oy/in_2008_a_chinese_dairy_company_intentionally/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uvm7oy/i...

b112 3mo ago
You're only hearing about the ones caught and punished. You have no proof of "Zero tolerance", or of what percentage of people are caught.
- malfist 3mo ago
  "Zero tolerance" and "we catch every criminal" are two unrelated ideas.
  - elevation 3mo ago
    Yes -- and even a spectacular punishment does not establish the guilt of the recipient. Some may be innocent (framed) or only partially guilty (scapegoat.) Other may have been known to be guilty all along and has only recently fallen out of favor.
    - jimmydoe 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - maerF0x0 3mo ago
    One of the problems with absolute authoritarian regimes is that the friends of those in power are defined as "not criminals", and vice versa for enemies. It's part of the reason I'm against presidential pardon. (Except for when it's retrospective on laws that have changed, maybe?)
  - observationist 3mo ago
    The thing they have zero tolerance for is the embarrassment, not the corruption, pollution, crime, or other abuse. You can do whatever you can get away with so long as you don't cause embarrassment or shame.
    - throw10920 3mo ago
      That's one of the big cultural differences that people from the West don't really get - that "saving face" is one of the core concepts that Eastern societies are built on - not the actual things that, when discovered, cause you to lose face (e.g. corruption).
      - blaufuchs 3mo ago
        Yeah it’s pretty funny how worked up the CCP get when they’re called out. “How dare you accuse us of launching a spy balloon?”. Whereas Russia hits you with the “oh those aren’t FSB agents, just lovers on vacation ;)”
        ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
        Well I given that it wasn’t a spy balloon in the end, perhaps they had a point
        nixon_why69 3mo ago
        I mean, the entire concept of "spy balloon over the continental US in the 21st century" could be considered a litmus test for critical thinking. A country with satellites is running a Wile E. Coyote tier balloon plot?
        throw10920 3mo ago
        Yes, and if you think it's not feasible, you failed the critical thinking test. Balloons have the ability to observe signals that satellites do not. It's that simple.
  - dnautics 3mo ago
    luckily the phrase gp wrote was: "caught and punished" So, zero tolerance cannot be known without correct stats on both catching and punishing. so it is, indeed unknowable.
- maxglute 3mo ago
  CCDI has disciplined like 7m+ officials by now, flies and tigers (low and high), _you_ only hear about the juiciest tigers. 100+ provincial/ministerial officials gets investigated per year. It's a wide anti corruption program, lazy but easy back of envelop calc, there's ~100m CCP members, need to be CCP to be in politics and business, so 7/100 ~7% of those classes including top level, which feels like reasonable amount given historic corruption rates. Anecdotally, petty level corruption essentially gone, corrupt/graft industrial complex (banquets/gifts etc it was entire service sector withing broader luxury) went out of business 10 years ago. Not saying corruption gone - it's evolved to your normal financial vehicle engineering like in west.
pibaker 3mo ago
> You can’t buy your way out if you do something Not with money.
- echelon 3mo ago
  It's also not like the West doesn't impose extremely harsh punishments on the top financial crimes. You can go away for life if you steal enough money.
  - golem14 3mo ago
    Right, cough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli, cough.
    - mothballed 3mo ago
      Shkreli's investors straight up testified they didn't feel victimized and that they would invest with him again. He didn't lose them any money or have any actual damages to people for the crime he was convicted of. I don't think he'd go to jail for what he did there in China, or even probably Singapore. If you're thinking of the pharmacy drug price jacking thing, the thing he did that physically harmed many people, he wasn't convicted for that.
      - golem14 3mo ago
        > Shkreli's investors straight up testified they didn't feel victimized That makes it right? And that is what you think is reprehensible about him ?
        mothballed 3mo ago
        It's not right, but that's how you get convicted of these crimes in Asia. If you make your investors money, everyone is happy, it's incredibly, incredibly incredibly unlikely you'll be convicted for defrauding them. In fact in the USA it's extremely rare to get convicted of defrauding a person that got the returns they want and have no interest in pressing charges. Now maybe if you hurt someone else in the process you'll get convicted, but that's not what happened in Shkreli's fraud conviction, the only people he was accused of harming were the investors who said weren't harmed and had no damages or interest in prosecution. What happened to Shkreli was a most extreme anomaly practically worldwide.
solenoid0937 3mo ago
[flagged]
KennyBlanken 3mo ago
Is there any evidence any of the people convicted were actually executed or imprisoned? If any of those people were politically connected, they probably just got a new identity and shoved off to somewhere else in the country.
- pibaker 3mo ago
  > If any of those people were politically connected Connection works both ways. You can be your superior's lapdog on Monday and jailed for being so cordial that he thinks you are trying to take over his position — I mean, taking bribes — by Wednesday. Given how this man stayed out of trouble for 30 straight years before finally being apprehended, I feel this could be exactly what happened. He probably had some political leverage to keep the prosecutors looking the other way. And the moment he lost his leverage — maybe his superiors changed their minds about him, maybe he stepped on the toes of someone, who knows — they went after him.
  - varjag 3mo ago
    What happens in countries with no rule of law is rule of power hierarchies. A regional party boss would have his trusted deputes running things, who have their underlings, they underlings have their preferred business partners (police chiefs, businessmen, prosecutors, control authorities) and so on. A bribe at any level is always redistributed upwards. Sometimes the big guy falls out of favor with bigger guys, and then the whole structure is up for grabs. The whole vertical is massacred (sometimes literally) while new people take over from the top down. Often what's visible happens a few degrees removed from the actual cause. There's understanding among the ruling class and much of the populace that it's just How Things are Done. But moments like that give you public trials with executions that make some naïve Westerners clap.
- jibal 3mo ago
  > If any of those people were politically connected, they probably just got a new identity and shoved off to somewhere else in the country. It's great that you provided evidence of that ... no hypocrite you.
DANmode 3mo ago
> If you get charged FTFY
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
hintymad 3mo ago
> penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance I think this is more about punishing political grafting than white-collar crime.
RajT88 3mo ago
The smart ones quit while they are ahead and procure citizenship somewhere else (like Canada).
- mempko 3mo ago
  I'm pretty sure the smartest ones just don't do crime.
  - aleqs 3mo ago
    LOL
    - 6510 3mo ago
      As long as god doesn't see it anything goes.
  - otikik 3mo ago
    They don’t get caught
  - rcbdev 3mo ago
    I think this is just materially incorrect.
  - illiac786 3mo ago
    You’ll have to define “smartest”. Crime and IQ don’t really correlate (negatively or positively) as far as I know.
    - RajT88 3mo ago
      Among the criminals embezzling public funds in China, arguably the ones who get away with it are the "smarter" ones. They may not have a higher IQ, but in fact it may be more like the ones who have more self control and discipline. It probably has not been studied. "Why have criminals who have not been caught not been studied?" is an exercise for the reader.
simmerup 3mo ago
Only if you get caught and someone in power doesn’t like you
warumdarum 3mo ago
? Everyone in the party is incolved in similar crimes. The only thing they are guilty off in addition is a lack of loyalty to emperor xi. Incompetence and criminal corruption, that you can edit out of history, but intrigue is unforgivable.
- ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
  Are you sure? Do you have an example of substantial disaster or scandal that resulted in loss of life and loss of face for China, but perpetuators got away? For UK I have: Grenfell tower scandal (over 100 dead, no one in prison), infected blood scandal (thousands dead, no one in prison), postmaster scandal (thousands falsely imprisoned , no perpetrator in prison), etc.
  - sbayg 3mo ago
    COVID19
    - reverius42 3mo ago
      Who, exactly, were the "perpetrators" of Covid19?
      - copper-float 3mo ago
        Whoever funded the laboratories in Wuhan.
        ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
        >> The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided roughly $1.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology So.. Biden?
        jamiek88 3mo ago
        Came to power in 2021 - time traveler too is he? Did you mean Trump?
dnautics 3mo ago
> nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant What about the bridge falling down people, or the overpromised scam apartment people, or the tunnel that flooded people, or the police officers that blocked view of the flowers left for the folks who died in the tunnel that flooded people, or the opened the dam to flood the farmers during the rainy season people, or the fake drains people, or the fake fire hydrants people, or the lead paint in the kids school food people, or the covered up the lead paint in the kids school food doctors, or the barricaded an apartment that was burning during covid people, or the apartments with styrofoam instead of concrete that collapsed in venezuela earthquake people...?
- throwawalien 3mo ago
  I haven't heard of many of these but the ones I have were state actors covering up things the state itself did or enabled. that's a different category from private executives getting punished when they embarrass Beijing.
  - dnautics 3mo ago
    i looked it up and at least the evergrande ceo seems to have bern fined to the point where he had to declare bankruptcy (as of a few months ago, my information is old), so i guess he did find some justice (i think hes not very bright and was likely lied to by his underlings -- many such cases, so it is nice that the buck stopped there but the root cause was not fixed afaict)
    - nixon_why69 3mo ago
      Evergrande was a credit crunch similar to Silicon Valley Bank, they were funding development of projects by selling the units before they're built, they got ahead of themselves and then a pullback in housing prices exposed them. It sucks extra bad for the people who took out a mortgage for a home that didn't get finished, but it does seem like more of a screwup than corruption.
epolanski 3mo ago
While I am all for holding especially c corp and politicians accountable, similar sentences are a tragedy for me because there is no legal system I would trust, and I don't believe in death sentences as a crime punishment.
Aunche 3mo ago
> If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. LOL. Bribery is basically required in China for anyone with a medium sized business. Otherwise, you'll be indefinitely blocked by a bureaucrat who has no incentive to help you. Departments in municipal governments are often underfunded and bribery makes up for a significant portion of their effective payroll.
- ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
  Facilitation payment are usually considered the less egregious kinds of bribery, some may be considered acceptable in a culture, and there can be a whole etiquette to it. In some countries, doctors or surgeons are severely underpaid and it would be customary for a well off citizen to bring them a gift or a cash summ before an important surgery. That’s quite different from Kickbacks (rampant in UK leaseholds by the way), etc.
  - Aunche 3mo ago
    Just because it's considered acceptable doesn't mean that you can't get in trouble for it down the line if you get the wrong people upset. "Acceptable" bribery goes far beyond giving a gift to your underpaid doctor. What I meant by funding payroll is that it's pretty common to basically "donate" to a hospital and then afterwards your kid magically has a job there. What those who fetishize China's punishment of billionaires need to understand that what allows for this punishment is also what allows for even more blatant corruption. Rule of law is just something that doesn't exist. You may think that the US no longer has rule of law under Trump, and while that's true to a certain extent, for the most part people act with a rule of law mindset because that's what they are familiar with.
    - ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
      I am just saying that it would be good if we could have more precise discussion about corruption because different types of it are not equal, and we have more precise terminology.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right. When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but they didn't backstop it. Meriweather and the Sheik and Scholes and the rest were wiped out, they worked it off for a couple of years for salary and then skunk away in shame (we had shame back then). Took it like men near as I can tell. I admire John Meriweather a great deal in spite of the scandal. President Clinton was impeached and very nearly removed from office for (ultimately) consenting but untoward involvement with a young woman (they got him on lying about it technically, but the political will was there because the country was furious about the skirt chasing. Enron. Accounting that went from aggressive to sketchy to fraudulent (most of it would pass with flying colors today). Hard time. Skilling, Fastow I think just got out like five years ago (don't take my word for the date). Ken Lay IIRC died before they locked him up which saved him dying inside. Madoff, died in prison. Ebbers, I think he died in prison too. When Microsoft was gearing up to strangle the web in its crib the Justice Department pulled guys off of terrorists and human traffickers to go take a pipe to Gates until he backed off, he was allowed to keep Microsoft intact by letting the web happen, the Feds weren't asking, he decided to not fuck around and find out. Consequences for serious fucking bad shit for people who are our leaders work. A people gets exactly what it demands from it's leaders and that's exactly what a people deserves. Right now we're choosing to settle for a lot less, China is demanding more. Which is why we're getting our asses kicked.
- mmooss 3mo ago
  I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but > China is demanding more. I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.
  - reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
    The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry. Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects. They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off. Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change? Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits. Real wages are going up. The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people. It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.
nkmnz 3mo ago
> You can’t buy your way out if you do something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face. You don't have to buy your way out as long as you are the government, i.e. the chairman.
DaedalusII 3mo ago
if trump ordered someone to be shot for accepting bribes we would find this idea a lot less appealing anyone who spent a lot of time in that part of the world will tell you this stuff can basically be made up the western method to do this is to plant csa material on a person and then publicly announce they've been caught with it. not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car your entire family and social network will immediately cut you off and very few consider these things can be fabricated
- gamblor956 3mo ago
  not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car That's because that's not how the laws worked in the U.S., nor have the laws ever worked that way. If that was actually how the laws worked, a lot of enemies of each administration would get tarred with this, instead of literally none of them.
  - DaedalusII 3mo ago
    https://www.hornwright.com/civil-rights-law/when-police-plant-evidence-how-to-prove-your-inn/ https://www.hornwright.com/civil-rights-law/when-police-plan... https://abcnews.com/US/florida-deputy-arrested-allegedly-planting-drugs-traffic-stops/story?id=64265554 https://abcnews.com/US/florida-deputy-arrested-allegedly-pla... https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/20/538279258/baltimore-police-caught-planting-drugs-in-body-cam-footage-public-defender-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/20/538279258...
    - gamblor956 3mo ago
      And they all won their cases. Drug possession isn't a strict liability crime. Did you actually read your cites?
Wingman4l7 3mo ago
What about if the harm is solely limited to people outside of China, because the product was export-only?
bs65 3mo ago
"If you get caught". Do the math on how many get caught per capita. Its like worrying about a random coconut falling on your head. Fighting corruption in unequal societies is not possible because ambitious people born without wealth and status, and constantly bombarded with signals from birth that wealth and status is a sign of success, will do whatever it takea to get it. The Law doesnt reduce corruption. Its just a story like Religion that allows people to cope with a reality they dont control.
- cindyllm 3mo ago
  [dead]
sam345 3mo ago
Only if the CCP doesn't like you or decides that it doesn't like you because you are more valuable as an enemy. Otherwise it's no big deal because politics in a communist country does not get done without bribes in one form or another. Honest players are not to be found in a communist country. Government is like open source. The more open you are, the less likely there is going to be shenanigans.
ballon_monkey 3mo ago
"You can’t buy your way out" Absolutely you can. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire thing is fabricated to just execute political opponents that don't align with Xi.
refurb 3mo ago
I’ve lived in 2 out of 3 of those countries and I can assure you people get away with fraud and corruption all the time. If you’re well connected (or making the right people rich) they are happy to overlook it. But if you bite off too much and they need a head to roll they will find one (usually someone lower level). I mean look at the number of military leader simply dismissed in China for massive corruption. They get a fat pension and go away quietly and the small guy pays with his life. Not sure I’d be expounding the greatness of that system.
jiaosdjf 3mo ago
China is as corrupt or more corrupt as anywhere else. You can absolutely buy your way out, or otherwise wrangle something. Zero tolerance death penalty for this sort of thing is a sign of extreme desperation - the fact that there are any such scandals despite the penalty is telling.

by Danox 3mo ago

b112 3mo ago

You're only hearing about the ones caught and punished. You have no proof of "Zero tolerance", or of what percentage of people are caught.

malfist 3mo ago
"Zero tolerance" and "we catch every criminal" are two unrelated ideas.
- elevation 3mo ago
  Yes -- and even a spectacular punishment does not establish the guilt of the recipient. Some may be innocent (framed) or only partially guilty (scapegoat.) Other may have been known to be guilty all along and has only recently fallen out of favor.
  - jimmydoe 3mo ago
    [dead]
- maerF0x0 3mo ago
  One of the problems with absolute authoritarian regimes is that the friends of those in power are defined as "not criminals", and vice versa for enemies. It's part of the reason I'm against presidential pardon. (Except for when it's retrospective on laws that have changed, maybe?)
- observationist 3mo ago
  The thing they have zero tolerance for is the embarrassment, not the corruption, pollution, crime, or other abuse. You can do whatever you can get away with so long as you don't cause embarrassment or shame.
  - throw10920 3mo ago
    That's one of the big cultural differences that people from the West don't really get - that "saving face" is one of the core concepts that Eastern societies are built on - not the actual things that, when discovered, cause you to lose face (e.g. corruption).
    - blaufuchs 3mo ago
      Yeah it’s pretty funny how worked up the CCP get when they’re called out. “How dare you accuse us of launching a spy balloon?”. Whereas Russia hits you with the “oh those aren’t FSB agents, just lovers on vacation ;)”
      - ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
        Well I given that it wasn’t a spy balloon in the end, perhaps they had a point
        nixon_why69 3mo ago
        I mean, the entire concept of "spy balloon over the continental US in the 21st century" could be considered a litmus test for critical thinking. A country with satellites is running a Wile E. Coyote tier balloon plot?
        throw10920 3mo ago
        Yes, and if you think it's not feasible, you failed the critical thinking test. Balloons have the ability to observe signals that satellites do not. It's that simple.
- dnautics 3mo ago
  luckily the phrase gp wrote was: "caught and punished" So, zero tolerance cannot be known without correct stats on both catching and punishing. so it is, indeed unknowable.
maxglute 3mo ago
CCDI has disciplined like 7m+ officials by now, flies and tigers (low and high), _you_ only hear about the juiciest tigers. 100+ provincial/ministerial officials gets investigated per year. It's a wide anti corruption program, lazy but easy back of envelop calc, there's ~100m CCP members, need to be CCP to be in politics and business, so 7/100 ~7% of those classes including top level, which feels like reasonable amount given historic corruption rates. Anecdotally, petty level corruption essentially gone, corrupt/graft industrial complex (banquets/gifts etc it was entire service sector withing broader luxury) went out of business 10 years ago. Not saying corruption gone - it's evolved to your normal financial vehicle engineering like in west.

pibaker 3mo ago

> You can’t buy your way out if you do something Not with money.

echelon 3mo ago
It's also not like the West doesn't impose extremely harsh punishments on the top financial crimes. You can go away for life if you steal enough money.
- golem14 3mo ago
  Right, cough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli, cough.
  - mothballed 3mo ago
    Shkreli's investors straight up testified they didn't feel victimized and that they would invest with him again. He didn't lose them any money or have any actual damages to people for the crime he was convicted of. I don't think he'd go to jail for what he did there in China, or even probably Singapore. If you're thinking of the pharmacy drug price jacking thing, the thing he did that physically harmed many people, he wasn't convicted for that.
    - golem14 3mo ago
      > Shkreli's investors straight up testified they didn't feel victimized That makes it right? And that is what you think is reprehensible about him ?
      - mothballed 3mo ago
        It's not right, but that's how you get convicted of these crimes in Asia. If you make your investors money, everyone is happy, it's incredibly, incredibly incredibly unlikely you'll be convicted for defrauding them. In fact in the USA it's extremely rare to get convicted of defrauding a person that got the returns they want and have no interest in pressing charges. Now maybe if you hurt someone else in the process you'll get convicted, but that's not what happened in Shkreli's fraud conviction, the only people he was accused of harming were the investors who said weren't harmed and had no damages or interest in prosecution. What happened to Shkreli was a most extreme anomaly practically worldwide.

solenoid0937 3mo ago

[flagged]

KennyBlanken 3mo ago

Is there any evidence any of the people convicted were actually executed or imprisoned? If any of those people were politically connected, they probably just got a new identity and shoved off to somewhere else in the country.

pibaker 3mo ago
> If any of those people were politically connected Connection works both ways. You can be your superior's lapdog on Monday and jailed for being so cordial that he thinks you are trying to take over his position — I mean, taking bribes — by Wednesday. Given how this man stayed out of trouble for 30 straight years before finally being apprehended, I feel this could be exactly what happened. He probably had some political leverage to keep the prosecutors looking the other way. And the moment he lost his leverage — maybe his superiors changed their minds about him, maybe he stepped on the toes of someone, who knows — they went after him.
- varjag 3mo ago
  What happens in countries with no rule of law is rule of power hierarchies. A regional party boss would have his trusted deputes running things, who have their underlings, they underlings have their preferred business partners (police chiefs, businessmen, prosecutors, control authorities) and so on. A bribe at any level is always redistributed upwards. Sometimes the big guy falls out of favor with bigger guys, and then the whole structure is up for grabs. The whole vertical is massacred (sometimes literally) while new people take over from the top down. Often what's visible happens a few degrees removed from the actual cause. There's understanding among the ruling class and much of the populace that it's just How Things are Done. But moments like that give you public trials with executions that make some naïve Westerners clap.
jibal 3mo ago
> If any of those people were politically connected, they probably just got a new identity and shoved off to somewhere else in the country. It's great that you provided evidence of that ... no hypocrite you.

DANmode 3mo ago

> If you get charged FTFY

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

hintymad 3mo ago

> penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance I think this is more about punishing political grafting than white-collar crime.

RajT88 3mo ago

The smart ones quit while they are ahead and procure citizenship somewhere else (like Canada).

mempko 3mo ago
I'm pretty sure the smartest ones just don't do crime.
- aleqs 3mo ago
  LOL
  - 6510 3mo ago
    As long as god doesn't see it anything goes.
- otikik 3mo ago
  They don’t get caught
- rcbdev 3mo ago
  I think this is just materially incorrect.
- illiac786 3mo ago
  You’ll have to define “smartest”. Crime and IQ don’t really correlate (negatively or positively) as far as I know.
  - RajT88 3mo ago
    Among the criminals embezzling public funds in China, arguably the ones who get away with it are the "smarter" ones. They may not have a higher IQ, but in fact it may be more like the ones who have more self control and discipline. It probably has not been studied. "Why have criminals who have not been caught not been studied?" is an exercise for the reader.

simmerup 3mo ago

Only if you get caught and someone in power doesn’t like you

warumdarum 3mo ago

? Everyone in the party is incolved in similar crimes. The only thing they are guilty off in addition is a lack of loyalty to emperor xi. Incompetence and criminal corruption, that you can edit out of history, but intrigue is unforgivable.

ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
Are you sure? Do you have an example of substantial disaster or scandal that resulted in loss of life and loss of face for China, but perpetuators got away? For UK I have: Grenfell tower scandal (over 100 dead, no one in prison), infected blood scandal (thousands dead, no one in prison), postmaster scandal (thousands falsely imprisoned , no perpetrator in prison), etc.
- sbayg 3mo ago
  COVID19
  - reverius42 3mo ago
    Who, exactly, were the "perpetrators" of Covid19?
    - copper-float 3mo ago
      Whoever funded the laboratories in Wuhan.
      - ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
        >> The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided roughly $1.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology So.. Biden?
        jamiek88 3mo ago
        Came to power in 2021 - time traveler too is he? Did you mean Trump?

dnautics 3mo ago

> nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant What about the bridge falling down people, or the overpromised scam apartment people, or the tunnel that flooded people, or the police officers that blocked view of the flowers left for the folks who died in the tunnel that flooded people, or the opened the dam to flood the farmers during the rainy season people, or the fake drains people, or the fake fire hydrants people, or the lead paint in the kids school food people, or the covered up the lead paint in the kids school food doctors, or the barricaded an apartment that was burning during covid people, or the apartments with styrofoam instead of concrete that collapsed in venezuela earthquake people...?

throwawalien 3mo ago
I haven't heard of many of these but the ones I have were state actors covering up things the state itself did or enabled. that's a different category from private executives getting punished when they embarrass Beijing.
- dnautics 3mo ago
  i looked it up and at least the evergrande ceo seems to have bern fined to the point where he had to declare bankruptcy (as of a few months ago, my information is old), so i guess he did find some justice (i think hes not very bright and was likely lied to by his underlings -- many such cases, so it is nice that the buck stopped there but the root cause was not fixed afaict)
  - nixon_why69 3mo ago
    Evergrande was a credit crunch similar to Silicon Valley Bank, they were funding development of projects by selling the units before they're built, they got ahead of themselves and then a pullback in housing prices exposed them. It sucks extra bad for the people who took out a mortgage for a home that didn't get finished, but it does seem like more of a screwup than corruption.

epolanski 3mo ago

While I am all for holding especially c corp and politicians accountable, similar sentences are a tragedy for me because there is no legal system I would trust, and I don't believe in death sentences as a crime punishment.

Aunche 3mo ago

> If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. LOL. Bribery is basically required in China for anyone with a medium sized business. Otherwise, you'll be indefinitely blocked by a bureaucrat who has no incentive to help you. Departments in municipal governments are often underfunded and bribery makes up for a significant portion of their effective payroll.

ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
Facilitation payment are usually considered the less egregious kinds of bribery, some may be considered acceptable in a culture, and there can be a whole etiquette to it. In some countries, doctors or surgeons are severely underpaid and it would be customary for a well off citizen to bring them a gift or a cash summ before an important surgery. That’s quite different from Kickbacks (rampant in UK leaseholds by the way), etc.
- Aunche 3mo ago
  Just because it's considered acceptable doesn't mean that you can't get in trouble for it down the line if you get the wrong people upset. "Acceptable" bribery goes far beyond giving a gift to your underpaid doctor. What I meant by funding payroll is that it's pretty common to basically "donate" to a hospital and then afterwards your kid magically has a job there. What those who fetishize China's punishment of billionaires need to understand that what allows for this punishment is also what allows for even more blatant corruption. Rule of law is just something that doesn't exist. You may think that the US no longer has rule of law under Trump, and while that's true to a certain extent, for the most part people act with a rule of law mindset because that's what they are familiar with.
  - ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
    I am just saying that it would be good if we could have more precise discussion about corruption because different types of it are not equal, and we have more precise terminology.

deleted 3mo ago

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reinitctxoffset 3mo ago

In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right. When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but they didn't backstop it. Meriweather and the Sheik and Scholes and the rest were wiped out, they worked it off for a couple of years for salary and then skunk away in shame (we had shame back then). Took it like men near as I can tell. I admire John Meriweather a great deal in spite of the scandal. President Clinton was impeached and very nearly removed from office for (ultimately) consenting but untoward involvement with a young woman (they got him on lying about it technically, but the political will was there because the country was furious about the skirt chasing. Enron. Accounting that went from aggressive to sketchy to fraudulent (most of it would pass with flying colors today). Hard time. Skilling, Fastow I think just got out like five years ago (don't take my word for the date). Ken Lay IIRC died before they locked him up which saved him dying inside. Madoff, died in prison. Ebbers, I think he died in prison too. When Microsoft was gearing up to strangle the web in its crib the Justice Department pulled guys off of terrorists and human traffickers to go take a pipe to Gates until he backed off, he was allowed to keep Microsoft intact by letting the web happen, the Feds weren't asking, he decided to not fuck around and find out. Consequences for serious fucking bad shit for people who are our leaders work. A people gets exactly what it demands from it's leaders and that's exactly what a people deserves. Right now we're choosing to settle for a lot less, China is demanding more. Which is why we're getting our asses kicked.

mmooss 3mo ago
I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but > China is demanding more. I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry. Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects. They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off. Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change? Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits. Real wages are going up. The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people. It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.

nkmnz 3mo ago

> You can’t buy your way out if you do something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face. You don't have to buy your way out as long as you are the government, i.e. the chairman.

DaedalusII 3mo ago

if trump ordered someone to be shot for accepting bribes we would find this idea a lot less appealing anyone who spent a lot of time in that part of the world will tell you this stuff can basically be made up the western method to do this is to plant csa material on a person and then publicly announce they've been caught with it. not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car your entire family and social network will immediately cut you off and very few consider these things can be fabricated

gamblor956 3mo ago
not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car That's because that's not how the laws worked in the U.S., nor have the laws ever worked that way. If that was actually how the laws worked, a lot of enemies of each administration would get tarred with this, instead of literally none of them.
- DaedalusII 3mo ago
  https://www.hornwright.com/civil-rights-law/when-police-plant-evidence-how-to-prove-your-inn/ https://www.hornwright.com/civil-rights-law/when-police-plan... https://abcnews.com/US/florida-deputy-arrested-allegedly-planting-drugs-traffic-stops/story?id=64265554 https://abcnews.com/US/florida-deputy-arrested-allegedly-pla... https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/20/538279258/baltimore-police-caught-planting-drugs-in-body-cam-footage-public-defender-says https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/20/538279258...
  - gamblor956 3mo ago
    And they all won their cases. Drug possession isn't a strict liability crime. Did you actually read your cites?

Wingman4l7 3mo ago

What about if the harm is solely limited to people outside of China, because the product was export-only?

bs65 3mo ago

"If you get caught". Do the math on how many get caught per capita. Its like worrying about a random coconut falling on your head. Fighting corruption in unequal societies is not possible because ambitious people born without wealth and status, and constantly bombarded with signals from birth that wealth and status is a sign of success, will do whatever it takea to get it. The Law doesnt reduce corruption. Its just a story like Religion that allows people to cope with a reality they dont control.

cindyllm 3mo ago
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sam345 3mo ago

Only if the CCP doesn't like you or decides that it doesn't like you because you are more valuable as an enemy. Otherwise it's no big deal because politics in a communist country does not get done without bribes in one form or another. Honest players are not to be found in a communist country. Government is like open source. The more open you are, the less likely there is going to be shenanigans.

ballon_monkey 3mo ago

"You can’t buy your way out" Absolutely you can. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire thing is fabricated to just execute political opponents that don't align with Xi.

refurb 3mo ago

I’ve lived in 2 out of 3 of those countries and I can assure you people get away with fraud and corruption all the time. If you’re well connected (or making the right people rich) they are happy to overlook it. But if you bite off too much and they need a head to roll they will find one (usually someone lower level). I mean look at the number of military leader simply dismissed in China for massive corruption. They get a fat pension and go away quietly and the small guy pays with his life. Not sure I’d be expounding the greatness of that system.

jiaosdjf 3mo ago

China is as corrupt or more corrupt as anywhere else. You can absolutely buy your way out, or otherwise wrangle something. Zero tolerance death penalty for this sort of thing is a sign of extreme desperation - the fact that there are any such scandals despite the penalty is telling.