For all the hullabaloo surrounding the perennial anti-graft campaigns, the risk of going to jail remains small even for officials caught with their hands in the till. Since 1982, about 80 per cent of the 130,000 to 190,000 officials disciplined annually for malfeasance by the Party received only a warning. Only 6 per cent were criminally prosecuted, and of them, only 3 per cent went to jail. ‘The odds of an average corrupt official going to jail are therefore at most 3 in 100,’ said Minxin Pei, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who calculated these figures, ‘making corruption
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