When Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist at Georgia State University who studies China, examined patterns of bribes and prosecutions, he expected to find that the mechanics of Chinese corruption followed the hierarchical patronage system found in Japan and Korea. Instead, Wedeman concluded, “the evidence suggests that corruption in contemporary China is essentially anarchy.” He wrote that “corruption in China more closely resembled corruption in Zaire than it did corruption in Japan.” But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party
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