China blackmail markets in everything

In Beijing, I met Benjamin Liebman, a professor at Columbia Law School, who has published a study on “malpractice mobs” in China. He told me that protests consistently extract more money from hospitals than legal proceedings do. Family members can even hire professional protesters. One report in Shenzhen mentioned an average price of fifty yuan a day for the service of a protester. The radiologist in Shanghai told me, “If your mother dies in the hospital, there will be an agency that comes to you and says, ‘We can help you. We can have twenty guys who can come to the hospital, blackmail them, and share fifty per cent of the profits.’ They’re very professional.”

The article, by Christopher Beam in The New Yorker, is interesting throughout.