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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

This is just par for the course in China. It is all about money laundering and not real mismanagement, the reasons are all "unclear" because these buildings are not built to be actually used...lots of corners are cuts and pockets are padded. So having an excuse not to open works out, and places the inevitable outrage into the next or next next administration.

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>It is all about money laundering

Maybe, but (apparently) in China many dead malls that were never really used were built simply to raise the GDP.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities-in-2014-2...

That is the official excuse, but those malls are crappy, where did the money really go? Bank lends money to SOE, SOE is told by CPC to build, SOE contracts out to some cronies, cronies subcontract out to more cronies, and so on...lots of cuts are taken, and finally something cruddy gets built that isn't useable but it doesn't matter since it isn't needed anyways.

We would be better off paying migrant workers to dig and fill in holes. Then at least you wouldn't have a monstrosity to tear down in a few years.

Tearing down monstrosities doesn't seem all that worse to filling the holes back in to me!

A lot of waste and air pollution. Construction and demolition alone contributed heavily to Beijing's bad air quality.

Compare "paying migrant workers to dig holes" vs. "paying migrant workers to dig and fill in holes". When you do both up front, you won't have to pay to fix things.

Blargh. If you spend a few million on a mall that no one uses, you're doing it wrong. If you measure those millions as part of GDP, you're doing that wrong too.

>It is all about money laundering

If this is true, then they need to learn about software - doing a fake project to build a new government website is a much easier laundering effort. And foreign hackers are always there to be blamed for the system not working!

Have you ever heard of Italia.it?

uh, this story is about italy.

Sure.

But the point is that the money all goes to the local good ol' boys, whoever they are. The local contractors who pour concrete. Beyond that...well, no one cares.

So? It's the same story in countries with highish levels of corruption.

China's corruption is almost all a byproduct of rapid growth. Italy's lacks that growth right now so their corruption is coming from somewhere else, perhaps intrinsic.

It doesn't matter where the corruption comes from, the rules of the game for transferring money from public pocket A to private pocket B using sham projects are pretty universal.

Did you just say that Italians are intrinsically corrupt people? I hope that's not what that meant.

I think parent meant the Italian system of goverment and their society. It wouldn't make sense to imbide the intrinsic qualities of something as large as the Italian nation as a whole into their citizens at birth.

I don't care what political/economic system you have; if you don't have a way of Stomping out corruption--your system won't work, or won't work very long.

For all our(United States) faults, what I am most proud of is that corrupt individuals are eventually caught. It might take too much time, but in the end; they are usually caught.

Personally, I despise corruption, and nepotism! (I threw in nepotism because I believe the best person should get the job, not the guy who has networked the most? Plus, it's been on my mind lately.)

> For all our(United States) faults, what I am most proud of is that corrupt individuals are eventually caught.

Individuals, perhaps, but not groups. George Will has a great column today about whaling museums, the mohair subsidy and sugar tariffs, as examples of the sort of petty corruption which we fall prey to.

George Will's column: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-barnacled-budget/2...

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