Yahui: The Chinese Art of Elegant Bribery (2011)

This would make a nice movie action script about the decadencee of art and how it's all bullshit from a business POV lol

You are trying to refute this article with whataboutism, but there is something unique and different about Chinese culture and corruption. The article even names it; "Corruption is the hidden golden rule of China". It's endemic; inherent to the Chinese culture. It's not seen as morally problematic. It's admirable if you can get away with it. It's very close to Might is Right as a belief system.

In the last nine years my new job has me interacting intimately with Chinese nationals in the USA and China. Every few months I get reminded that most, but not all, Han Chinese have very different moral rules. It's very disheartening.

I remember reading from traffic accident in China involving lorry that was loaded full of money. Some officials get so much bribes that their problems are similar to Colombian drug lord.

> no one is allowed to be clean in this game.

That is why corruption is endemic to authoritarian regime. In a state where it is impossible to climb the ladder without accepting bribes and giving them, you make sure everybody and guilty and its easy to do some "clean-up" whenever you need it.

Anti-corruption operations in authoritarian regime is just this, replacing problematic cronies with more faithful ones.

Systemic corruption is a proven mean of control.

Corruption is a defacto development mechanism for making state funds behave more like free market allocation in China. It's the reason why China is the only country where increased corruption is correlated to increased growth - a paradox according to classical development theories. This is posited by Yukon Huang, former World Bank director for China, Russia, and Former Soviet Union Republics. Everywhere else corruption leads to inefficient allocation. The secret sauce is connecting corruption with bureaucratic incentives, i.e. graft a little on the side but they better build X new residential units, Y infrastructure to meet Z urbanization goals as dictated by the central committee. Chinese mixed-economy is/was* an elegant hack to have a more capitalist market while preserving a nominally socialist economic narrative, and an apt development tool for her needs.

*Was - the caveat to this system is that prolonged corruption is damaging to social stability - hence Xi's anticorruption drive that later analysis have determined to be more pragmatic than pure power grab - CCDI doesn't punish 1 million officials for shits and giggles. But up until recently, it's mostly targetted low-level "flies" versus high-level "tigers" - which I surmise is much more politically difficult, but high-ranking shakeups are underway since last year. As for sincerity of these reforms, wiki-leaked analysis on Xi when he was vice-premier can be summarized as: not the smartest but utterly incorruptible (his family not so much).

I tried to find this movie but failed. I only found a 2009 movie by the Coen brothers. But I assume you meant a different one?