In October 2019, Xing Yun, the Deputy Director of the National People’s Congress of the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, was charged with bribery and sentenced to death with reprieve. With an estimated 449 million CNY (62 million USD) that Xing had illegally appropriated across his two-decade-long career in Inner Mongolia, it became at the … 2019: Connecting the dots of China’s largest bribery scandal
In 2011, on the heels of a train crash that killed 40 people and stoked the public’s ire, Caixin revealed large-scale corruption in the building of the country’s high-speed rail system. The long story exposed the “broken system” in the Railways Ministry and in a subsequent issue, put the railways minister Zhang Shuguang on its cover and reported that he had purchased a luxury mansion near Los Angeles in 2002, when he was earning less than 300 USD a month. The minister was tried, accused of funnelling as much as 2.8 billion USD to overseas accounts.
The article is covering the protests that first broke out in Wukan, a village in China’s Guangdong province. In 2011, this was the most detailed article covering the protests at the time. The protests were sparked by local officials’ illegal sale of collectively-owned village land, leading to widespread anger among the villagers.
On 12 May 2008, a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake shook China’s Sichuan province, resulting in the collapse of an estimated 21,600 buildings, including around 7,000 schools and the deaths of at least 70,000 people including 19,000 school students. In the aftermath of the disaster, human rights media 64 Tianwang denounced the shoddy design, due to local government negligence and corruption, that led to the collapse of almost all the school buildings in the province.
Just weeks after this story was published, 64 Tianwang’s founder, prominent human rights activist and journalist Huang Qi, was arrested on suspicion of “illegally possessing state secrets,” for which he later served a 3-year prison term. In September 2008, a government committee admitted that many of the schools were built quickly during the economic boom and suffered from poor construction.
Liu Binyan’s “People or Monsters,” published by People’s Literature in 1979, is a fictionalized story based on factual reporting about a corrupt government official in Heilongjiang Province, and the whistleblowers who exposed her. Liu paints China’s governance as a web of interlocking connections (a social mechanism known as “guanxi”) rather than a system based on the rule of law, and depicts corruption as an endemic phenomenon rather than an exception. As it exposed a dark side of socialism, “People or Monsters” became popular across China, but the writer, who had already spent part of his life in labor camps, was expelled from the party in 1987 and fled to the United States where he remained until his death in 2005.