Wealth and Corrupt Activities of the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party [pdf]

> One scholarly study focusing on one city found that 8- to 65-percent of officials—depending on the official’s rank—received an unofficial income from bribery or graft

Not wanting to be too picky, that spread of numbers makes the entire sentence significantly less valuable to me. This could be a fat tail, or a long tail. I would expect that a lot of people get little gifts and a few people skim huge gift totals off underlings, or off big players.

Graft is a serious problem. I like the indian proposed approach of giving government players play money which says "this is a highly immoral bribe"

When Xi's time at the helm comes to an end, there are three plausible outcomes in my mind, alongside all the others

1) somebody just carries on the game as-is

2) somebody goes hard on an anti-corruption drive with a return to core values (I was under the impression this is partly what the Shanghai leadership were doing when Bo Xilai was done down, although anti-corruption drives are often a good cover for .. corrupt practices)

3) somebody goes hard on militarism, which is the other Xi plank, and we wind up in a hot war over Taiwan. This will necessarily ignore corruption, because corrupt people can be very efficient at supplying Materiel. For a while.

The thing is with lots of money sloshing around, people look for ways to secure it. Buying tencent and ali shares only gets you so far, and this is the kind of reason there is a lot of russian spoken in Malta and Cyprus. I would expect a lot of money to flow out of Macau and Hong Kong, ie through gambling, or ownership of casinos, which is a traditional method of washing dirty money.

So riddle me this: who, currently at the helm of a large western power, has history of investment in Casinos?