Since most American legislators come from a legal background, the culture of national politics has this world view. Chinese leadership is majority engineering, so at least they have some sense that physics isn't impressed dollars and poll results.
Not to mention the fact that China seems the be having a massive problem with official corruption. In fact, China's official corruption problem is arguably worse than America's. At least our politicians are bought with campaign dollars. It appears that Chinese politicians and bureaucrats are bought with direct payments.
In short, we should expect the United States to be corrupt because of lawyers and China to be not corrupt because of engineers, and I'm just saying that's the opposite of the truth.
I really don't care all that much, I'm just really curious now why you bothered to mention China at all if what you were trying to say was that the US is worse than we thought.