Imagine you're living in China, trying to work your way out of the family date farming business (which garners approximately $450 annually). You do all the right things. You apply for (and receive) Communist Party membership. You study literally to the point of collapse, and despite coming from coal-town origins, you score high on your gao kao ("high test," more-or-less the only thing that matters in getting into a Chinese university). Your already-poor family goes deep into debt to send you to college, and you even manage to come out with a degree. Classic rise-up-by-your-own-bootstraps tale, right? However, finally, when you go to apply for a job—your state-sanctioned educational, occupational, and political records are inexplicably, awfully gone. What has happened to that plain manila folder (!) that serves as your only legitimate, official history in Chinese society? Probably stolen and sold so a party official's child can get everything you worked so hard for. And then, of course, your family is detained by party officials when your parents demand to know where the hell your life went. Of course. [more inside]
posted by Keter on Jul 27, 2009 - 47 comments

"At 1am on June 19, police and funeral cars arrived at the hotel, wanting to take the body away. 2,000 Shishou residents blocked the hotel entrance to protect Xu's corpse."
posted by sswiller on Jun 21, 2009 - 38 comments

Some of the female Chinese gymnasts are apparently under-age. It wasn't their skulls, their chins or their eyes that gave them away: it was the internet.
posted by chuckdarwin on Aug 20, 2008 - 130 comments

Corruption Threatens China's Future In a new report for the Carnegie Foundation, Pei Minxin offers an estimate that official corruption in China may cost as much as USD86bln each year - 0.65 percent of GDP and more than the education budget. He calls for economic and political reform; his critics might say no surprise there.
posted by Abiezer on Oct 12, 2007 - 17 comments

Power, corruption and lies. An article in which one Will Hutton discusses China's weakness.
posted by thirteenkiller on Jan 8, 2007 - 32 comments

Death for embezzling? The former chief of the state run Bank of China, Liu Jinbao, was given a suspended death sentence for embezzling 7.72M yuan (approximately 1M USD). His assets have been seized, and it is expected that his sentence will be commuted to life in prison. As China actively seeks to lure foreign investments, including banks, this is meant to send a strong signal about corruption in the financial sector.
posted by SirOmega on Aug 13, 2005 - 18 comments

Corrupt Chinese Officials Plan Escape Routes. Why? Because they believe the collapse of the Chinese government is imminent. Their planning is premature, experts quoted here say. But we all know that experts can often be . . . well, not so expert. Wild headline, to say the least.
posted by raysmj on Apr 23, 2001 - 36 comments