 Well, good evening. Some of you may still be signing in, but let me get started. My name is Steve Tsang. I am the director of the Sova China Institute. Very pleased as today we have an extremely interesting and important subject for discussions and it will be led by somebody who is probably the world's leading authority on this subject. The subject of the discussion is what is Xi fighting? The dynamics of corruption in post-Mao China. The speaker is Professor Andrew Waitman. Andrew is a professor of politics and the director of the China Studies Program at the Georgia State University in the United States of America. He has worked a lot on China's corruption issues and he has published already two books, very important books and he's working on the third one. He's the author of For Miles to Market, Rends Seeking Local Protectionism and Marketization in China. He's also author of Double Paradox, Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China. And the project he's working on is Analyzing Xi Jinping's Anti-Corruption Campaign, which is at the moment, entitled Hunting Tigers and Swapping Flies. Xi Jinping's Battled with Corruption. And I believe that much of what he's going to be talking to us will be building on his published work and his forthcoming works, his current project. While he will be speaking obviously a lot on the terms of the issues building up to the kind of corruption challenges that Xi Jinping will be facing, I'm sure he would be perfectly happy to engage with you in conversations about more contemporary situations of corruption or counter-corruption in China. Now, before I hand over to Andrew, I realized that from previous experience, some of you will be putting through questions before the end of the presentation. So if you plan to do so, please use the Q&A function. And if you are watching this via the Facebook streamed, your questions will be put by Archies to me through a different channel. And I will try to make sure that questions being put through both the Facebook stream as well as the Zoom participants being addressed. This meeting is being recorded. So if you are concerned about the recording, please bear that in mind. And if you would like to ask a question anonymously, you can do so, but instead of simply not providing your name, please simply say that you would prefer your identity to be kept anonymous. It would be helpful for me to know who you are and also where you are from. It just give me a bit of context to understand where the question comes from, but your identity, if you would like to protect it, will definitely be protected. With that, let me now hand over to Professor Wakeman. Well, thank you, Dr. Sang for that kind introduction. I'm not sure I am the world's expert on corruption, although my former boss used to call me Mr. Corruption and I wasn't quite sure that was a good thing. But thank you very much for having me. Thank you to all of the audience joining us this evening. Typically when people wanted me to talk about anti-corruption in China, and particularly the post-2013 crackdown, the first question of course is who? And well, the who is not all that complicated. As you can see from my screen, I've lined up the big six, Bo Xilai, Zhou Yankang, Lin Jiwa, Susai He, Guo Bo Xiong, and San Xiong Sua. The five, excuse me, six members of the Polit Bureau that had been taken down between 2012, 2017. Of course, as I'll talk about in a moment, there are a tiny fraction of the number of people who have been investigated, indicted, and convicted over the past eight years. Generally, the second question people wanted to get to and that is why? What is the campaign all about? They wanna know, is it an anti-corruption cleanup? Is it a purge? Is it a political purge? Is it a witch hunt? And that's an important question and I'm happy to entertain it. And my answer is to all three of those questions is yes. It's a combination of all of those. There is certainly a political element to it. It occupies a very tiny corner of the overall anti-corruption crackdown. It's mostly at the high level, but beneath the high level, and I will argue in the course of this talk that once you get beyond the headline, once you get beyond the exciting parts of who's doing what to whom and who's a protege of who and so forth, there's a much bigger question and that is the what question. What is Xi Jinping battling? And here I think we need to start out and focus on what an anti-corruption crackdown involved. The crackdown is actually a response to corruption. It is a response to the sense presumably that corruption has increased and that if the regime doesn't do something about it, corruption will spiral out of control. So when we look at the kind of visible part of an anti-corruption campaign, we're not actually looking at corruption in the genesis of corruption. We're looking at the end of corruption. We're not looking at when people begin to be corrupt. We're looking at when they abruptly stop being corrupt because they've been arrested, indicted and so forth. So that when we look at what's happened between 2013 and this morning, or excuse me, in your case this evening, all of that is a response to things that happened earlier. And so what I wanna suggest in this talk and I guess it's probably worth saying something about the background of my perpetual in-process book, Hunting Tigers and Flotting Flies. I sort of started out with a kind of narrative thinking about or thinking that what was important about the anti-corruption campaign was the who and the why. But as I got into it, I realized the major question is the what and what is I'll talk about later. Tigers, the senior people involved in corruption, the gang of six that I have up on this preliminary slide, they didn't start life as tigers. They started life not at the top, but much lower down in the party state apparatus. And they climbed that party state apparatus over a process in the case of some of them over several decades. And during those time, many of them were involved in corruption, which to me, and I'll get into this later in the talk, suggests that what we need to be looking at is not in order to understand what we need to be looking at in order to understand Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crackdown of 2013, 2012 is we need to be looking at a period much earlier than this, which is when the corruption he is fighting today actually began to take off. So let me begin, I'll run through and highlight some of the things about the crackdown itself. One thing I don't know if you notice, I use the term crackdown rather than campaign. A campaign tends to suggest there's a big ending in an end. And what I'm gonna suggest in a minute is that Xi Jinping's crackdown that begins in 2013 is actually in effect the fifth offensive in a war on corruption that in the post-Mao period began really in 1982. But if you think about it, it's the latest in a very long series of anti-corruption drives by the Communist Party of China that began really in the 1950s. And if you go back even prior to the formation of the People's Republic, there were campaigns against corruption within the party going back to almost to its origins in the 1920s. So let me move ahead. There we go. If you look at this, this charts the number of investigations by the old Discipline Inspection Commission and its new incarnation, the Supervisory Commission. As you can see, the numbers shoot up dramatically beginning in 2013 on the number of party investigation. One of the reasons that people have pointed to for this increase was the adoption of something called the eight-point regulation. The eight-point regulation basically covers not so much corruption as a kind of extravagance at public expense. Xi Jinping was famous early on for going to a restaurant in Beijing and ordering a very simple meal, reaching into his pocket, paying 21 quai for the meal, sitting down with the other patrons, et cetera. It was famous for him announcing that henceforth there would be four dishes and a soup would be all that would serve, no more maotai. In fact, in many cases, no alcohol at all. Actually, the four dishes and a soup go back to the early 1990s. It was not Xi Jinping's invention. And the eight-point regulation does not explain the huge jump that we've seen in the number of party members investigated. You will notice that my data really ended about 2018. The last couple of years, there have been changes in the way they report the data, both for the party discipline inspection slash supervisory commission, but more importantly also in the case of the curatorate, which actually is the judicial body. If you look at the chart, it's quite striking. The number of party investigations skyrockets, but that lower line, which is the number of judicial actions in this chart, the number of people who have cases filed against them. And this is the kind of second step that the curatorate undertakes in an investigation. It goes up a little bit, 2013, 2014. And as you can see by 2016, it's actually fallen back to the levels of prior to the campaign. Well, this is the aggregate number. And of course, aggregate numbers mean that you not only have the rank and file or what the Chinese Brecht likes to call the flies, but you have much bigger fish as well. So when we break the procuratoratorial numbers down and look at it by level, what you can see is at the bottom there, I have the rank and file, the flies. And that number actually doesn't change dramatically. It's running in the mid, around 35,000 a year and it doesn't shoot up. The number of people at the county and departmental level, which it's sometimes referred to in the Chinese presence, the rats, laohu, laohu, they go up quite a bit, but where you really see the increase is in people at the prefectural and the bureau level and then also, of course, at the provincial and the ministerial level. And there you get these very big jumps in 2014, 2015. But again, you will notice that they began to fall off as well. Let's take this into a kind of longer historical perspective and see where we are in the war on corruption. This charts the number of cases filed and charting this over time is a little tricky because in 1997, they rewrote the criminal code, they decriminalized cases, which resulted in a big drop in the number of cases filed and in fact, probably didn't result in that much of a difference when you net out the ones that were decriminalized. They started changing the way they reported the data in about 2003, 2004. And I've tried, if you look at the dashed line and the kind of lower level, that's my attempt to create a long-term theory. And what you can see is we get the first big crackdown in 1982, another one in 1986, and then a huge one in 1989. The one in 89, of course, is a response to the anti-government demonstrations and was very much an attempt by the party to deal with demand for action against high-level corruption. What's important about all three of these is they are all crackdowns on the rank and file. There are some senior people that get caught up over the years, of course, Chen Xitong in 1995, Chen Lianyu in 2006, but by and large, during this period, these three first campaigns, crackdowns one, two, and three are crackdowns on the rank and file. When we look at the next two levels, the rats and the wolves, as I like to call them, we have flies, we have tigers, we need to have animals for the others too. If you look at the number of people at the county and the departmental level, that goes up quite dramatically in 1993, 94, 95, jumping from that 180 a year to an average in recent years of somewhere in the order of 24 to 2500. And again, that goes up dramatically in 2013, 14, and 15, only then to fall back to its pre-2013 level. The number of people at the prefecture, it's a little hard to know what they were doing before 1998, they didn't report the data separately. My guess is the pattern looks probably similar to what we see in the case of the county and departmental level, but again, a fairly dramatic jump in 2014 and 2015, and then falling back down, not to its previous level remaining elevated at, but again, moving back down toward where it was before. Here we have the tiger hunt. I have plotted this by quarter, going back to 2001. Tigers technically are individuals holding the rank of vice governor, deputy party, provincial party secretary, vice minister and above. Since we don't actually always know the precise level that people, precise rank people hold, it's a little bit hard sometimes to figure out who is a tiger and who is simply a very large cat. And so the numbers vary a little bit. This is my count, but you can see quite striking is that prior to 2011, between 2000 and 2011, only 42 people at the most senior level. And you can see I've put in the numbers themselves under the annual tolls. Five, one, five, eight, three, two, fairly low numbers. And if you look at some of these, some of them are related to particular scandals. 2006, you'll notice the number goes up and of course what that is, that's generally on yield and the crackdown on the Shanghai case. If you look at after that, after 2013, between 2013, and I'm happy to say yesterday morning, 238, so a dramatically larger number. I singled out 2012 simply because officially the campaign begins in 2013. I actually think it began in 2012 and that began not with Bo Shi live necessarily, but I think actually it begins, I think the genesis is more in 2011 with the case against Gu Zhenchang, the deputy director of the PLA Logistical Department. And I think that case in particular was a signal, not only to Xi Jinping, the heir apparent, but also Hu Jintao and others that there was very serious high level corruption within the military and possibly within other areas. So as you can see, if you were to sum up and ask, if you were to say, where is the campaign today? I would say that the number of the prosecutions and investigations at the senior level remains elevated compared to the pre-2013 levels. It has fallen back down. We aren't getting the really kind of spectacular headline-busting cases of the Zhou Yankang and Bo Shi lies, but there still continues to be this drive against corruption at the senior level. What makes this interesting, I think, is when we put it in a larger perspective. We looked at this campaign and we look at a series of campaigns. We actually, there are a total of five anti-corruption crackdowns by my count. In 1982, 86, 89, I count 94 as a intermediate one and then of course the high level campaign in beginning of 2013. In the early 90s, there was an effort begun to create a measure which would allow social scientists to compare levels of corruption. And in those early years, China was ranked number six in one of the early polls. And if you actually track the transparency international ratings, you'll see it's quite striking is that the red line is China. The black line is the mean. The blue line is the median. So the middle of the pack is somewhere between those two blue lines. And if you were to read the kind of outside assessments, what I call the perceived level of corruption in China. And this is what people ask me how corrupt is China? I actually respond, I really don't know because I just don't know how corrupt other countries are. But perhaps I'm too close to the subject to actually have an opinion. But if you look at it, it's quite striking. China regresses towards the median and it is dead in the middle of the pack, beginning almost 15 years ago. It continued to regress towards the mean except for that blip in 2014. And what is that blip? That is the people that transparency is using to generate their corruption perception index. That's their reaction to the campaign. So what happens is when we look at this and I'm not trying to tell you that transparency isn't doing a good job, but what this is is this is a reading of where the anti-corruption effort is, what the anti-corruption effort is revealing. And as I began to get into this project, and what I did was I was building a database. I kind of track who's being indicted and some specifics about the case. And I was particularly interested not only in the date that they stopped being corruption, but the date that they started being corruption. And this is an idea I would attribute although I'm sure others have thought about it to a professor Guo Yang at Tsinghua University who published a piece in the China Quarterly, I still ask publication, a number of years ago. But he started really talking about the importance of looking at when did people begin to be corrupt? Well, right now I'm in a position to give you some data on the Tigers. Data is not complete because of course, when you look at the process, the way that a case is generally revealed, the first thing is an announcement of an investigation. The second is an announcement of the results of the party investigation. Generally spells out whether they were expelled from the party and so forth remanded to the procuratorate. Those statements in some ways are often boilerplate. You can get on the CCDI website and they report them out on a kind of daily basis. They're interesting in themselves in that if you read them, they're basically a description of what the party sees as the malfeasance it's dealing with. And it's a combination of essentially criminal corruption, bribery, embezzlement, misappropriation. It's also a, it also involves political disobedience, disloyalty of the party. But then there's a lot of personal things, carrying on extramarital affairs, gambling, so on and so forth. But that doesn't really provide you a lot of information. We really don't pick up case-specific information until there's a conviction. And at that point we learn how much, when, who, et cetera. And so what I've done is up my 238 tigers, I've plotted those that I have the complete data for. And here's what I think is where we begin to get into the interesting part of the analysis. The tigers Xi Jinping has bagged since 2013 were almost all involved in corruption well before the anti-corruption campaign. If you scan the line, it tracks the cumulative percentage. 50% of them had been involved in corruption for over 10 years before the beginning of the campaign. Almost all of them had turned corrupt well in advance of the campaign. So when you look at it, what this chart tells you is, Xi Jinping is not reacting to sudden short-term change. I think he certainly was reacting to the two cases, the Gujian Shan case, the Bo Xilai case, et cetera. Those were, I think, triggered. But I think what he's fighting, and to get back to my question of what is Xi Jinping fighting, he's fighting corruption that took off in the 1990s and on into the first decade of the 21st century. That's important because what it tells you when you go back to the previous figure that I showed you about what we perceived or what experts perceived about corruption in China is they entirely miss what appears to be a major dynamic. And this is the advent of serious high-level corruption, but at the time it was not high-level corruption. If you go back to this period, if you go back to 1992 or 1993, when Zhou Yankang, for example, was allegedly first becoming involved in corruption, he was a low-level manager with the Chinese National Petroleum Company. What happens with him and with Bo Xilai and with these other tigers is they rise up through the ranks. They move from being, in most cases, these are not flies. These are not your village parties, secretaries, your deputy directors of offices of bureaus at the county and levels. They start off at the mid-level. But what's important is this. And this is where the next step comes into the analysis is you need to look at career. What this figure is telling you is these people started a medium level. So not to imply that Xi Jinping is corrupt, but he begins at the county level and he gets promoted over and over again. So first of all, you have this long period where people are in effect getting away with it. So what I did was to actually look at how long had people been involved in corruption? And again, this is looking only at the tigers, looking at the rank and file, shall we say a little bit more challenging because there are a lot of them. And gathering the data is somewhat complicated process. But what this looks at is, this looks at how many years had elapsed between when someone became corrupt and when they stopped being corrupt. And if you look at it, a fairly not insignificant amount of people get caught early on in their first year. But then if you look at it, people are getting away with it for an average of 12, 13, 14 years. And here in, you have to think about, you have to think about corruption as a kind of iterated game of chance in which once you become involved in corruption, through every time period, there's a chance of getting caught. And so what you have is, if you've been corrupt for 13 or 14 years, you have had repeated chances of being exposed. And in the case of these senior people, people, senior officials who the quote unquote tigers, part of that occurs when they get promoted. When you get promoted in China, they're supposed to do an audit. When you leave an office, you're supposed to get audited. And yet what this is these charts, these two charts in combination are telling us is the system repeatedly failed. Remember, I talked about four anti-corruption crackdowns before the 2013. If the system had been working, many of these people should have been weeded out before they reached the ranks in which you could become a potential tiger. Obviously some people at the top are not tigers, they're lions because they're actually honest and upright officials. But what we get is this major breakdown in the system prior to the advent of the campaign. So let me move on. I do wanna leave plenty of time for questioning questions. This is one other thing that I had been working on is that I went back and forth on whether to share this chart or not because as I'll tell you in a second there, it may be somewhat misleading, but I think it's intriguing and it's worth thinking about. And what this did was to track the number of people who were identified as having retired before they were prosecuted. Back in 2013, 2012, 13, 14, one of the things that was brought up repeatedly about the importance of the prosecution of Jo-Yan Khan was the fact that he was retired. He had been a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. He retired because of his age in 2012, 17th Party Congress, 18th Party Congress, and there was some talk out there about the fact that if you somehow navigated to the point, if you got away with it until you retired, that was something of a protection. Well, this chart suggests that one of the things that 2013 campaign, post-2013 campaign, has really changed is retirement is no longer an escape. There is no in effect statute of age limitation that if you don't get caught while you're an official, well, bygones will be bygones. So that's one of the big changes, but also what it tells you is that it is possible that one of the things that Xi Jinping has done since 2013 is they have begun not only to try and deal with current corruption, but they are also trying to address previous corruption. And therefore they are going after people who retired. And in some cases it's a year, it's a two, it's three years. But there are people who retired five, six, seven, I think I found one that had retired almost 10 years earlier. And so it does seem that what he's done is there's not only an intensification of the corruption that we see in the rise in the number of current officials being investigated, prosecuted and punished, but also a deepening in the sense that they're going back into the history of the, or back into previous periods in order to root out previous corruption. So let me try to bring this all together. And suggest what, and to make it, to give you an idea of where I'm thinking and why I'm taking so long to get this book done. If you look at this chart, and it's a fairly simple one, and it's an attempt to show you the kind of, the bureaucratic or the hierarchy of the party state. Tigers, of course, make up a tiny fraction of the total at the very top. Below them are the wolves, the rats, and the flies. And of course, the flies make up statistically the vast majority of people involved in corruption, but also the officiate at large. If what these charts tell me is, not only do you have to look into the past, not only do you have to go back and say, well, what was going on in the mid 1990s, in the early 2000s, that would have created new opportunities, new incentive for people to turn to corruption. But you also have to go back and look at what was going on among the lower level. Because these tigers of today grew up. They started out probably as rats. They turned into wolves and they rose up. And so what matters is, if we want to understand what were the incentives, what was going on at these levels, back 10 years ago, back a number of years ago. So I've begun to try and compile a fairly extensive database on rank and file, lower level corruption, so that I can begin to put the tigers into context. And here what I think what I'm trying to get at is, I don't wanna just look at the tigers in their cages. I don't wanna just be able to look at them once they get caught. I wanna look at the tigers in the wild. I want to know what was the jungle like that they turned into tigers, that they navigated from being mid-level officials. To intermediate level officials and on up. And so what I'm trying to get at in the book and trying to get across in this talk is, we've had a major problem with how we have looked at corruption in the past. We have essentially looked at it in a fairly superficial manner. We have concentrated on people who have gotten corrupt. We ask, well, who were they? Okay, so Jo Young-Kang is a member of the Politburo, former secretary of the politics and law commission, minister of public security, first party secretary of Chongqing and the minister of commerce general manager of Chinese national patrol. All that's important, but we need to unpack, we need to know what was the context back when he was in Panjian. He was a minor official. He becomes, I think he was mayor of Panjian city. What were conditions like? And particularly what we need to know because what really, what shapes the environment in terms of corruption are the three P's. The payoffs, the probabilities and the penalties. We need to know a great deal more about rank and file corruption, about mid-level corruption before we can really begin to focus in on the significance, not only of the who and the why questions that I started with, but the what. And what is it that Xi Jinping is really battling? Is he really just battling a number of fairly finite number of tigers and wolves and rats and so forth? Or what my analysis just is he is battling a much larger systemic problem. And it's a systemic problem that has deep groups that we need to go back to the 90s. We need to go back to the 2000s and think about what was going on there. So then now it is time for my self-criticism because this gets me into what has been one of the challenges of writing this new book. Because of course, if you go back in 2012, at about the same time that O.G.Y was getting in trouble and the anti-interest in corruption and anti-corruption began to take off, I of course published a book, Double Paradox, Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China. In which I was seeking to address what I called a double paradox, too public. One was that China had had rapid growth even though corruption was apparently getting worse in the 1980s and in the mid-1990s. So I wanted to try and explain that. And part of the explanation which I still cleave through is corruption was a product of the transition. It was a product of the commodification of things that had little tangible value under the old planned economy system. They were being moved on to the market. They suddenly were all of these windfall profits that entrepreneurs and others were gonna make. And essentially my argument was officialdom decided that they should get a piece of the action, too. The other part of my argument was that once you got through this transition, once the windfall profits in the rents began to dissipate, that China's anti-corruption effort, those campaigns, those three campaigns in the 1980s that cracked down in the 90s, my argument was that China had managed, if not to eradicate or to reduce corruption, it had managed to get it under control. And what the analysis I started off working on in 2000, I actually started grading this book and I think it was the summer of 2014. And then I backed off then because it was clear the action was still going on and I didn't wanna write something prematurely. More recently, the thing I'm wrestling with is corruption on a kind of aggregate level may not have gotten any worse. It may not have become any more prevalent. But what the data from Xi Jinping's anti-corruption crackdown, and particularly what this piece that I've looked at so far, the piece that's concentrated on the, in effect, seemingly large but actually quite small, group of titers, the ones that are in the cages now, is that in fact, corruption was deepening in the period, in the decade plus before Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign. And it was deepening in the sense that it was moving up. It was moving up through this pyramid and that if mid-level corruption was common in the 90s, what we see and what the data from the campaign suggests is that by the time Xi Jinping, and I actually think Hu Jintao had a hand in it, I think what happened in 2011, in 2012 is they started staring into the abyss. That corruption was not a few bad apples. It was not a lower level problem. It was a systemic problem in the sense that they were failing to correct, to catch people at the intermediate level before they became politically powerful, before they, when they were still much easier to target than when they were in the Politburo, but they had gotten into the Politburo. And therefore what Xi Jinping is dealing with is not only a problem of titers, he's dealing with a problem of a jungle that the party really has not effectively controlled and not been able to effectively weed out those at the mid-level who could be, who could evolve or morph from being rats and wolves into tigers. I will stop there and I am happy to entertain questions. Professor Sop. Well, thank you very much, Andrew. That was really fantastic talk with enormous amounts of data that you have built up. So if I may get it started before I open it to the floor, corruption, particularly when we are looking at not individual corruptions, but organized corruption, can fall into different types. It could be syndicated, it could be systemic, it could be a bit of both. In the case that you're talking about, fundamentally from anything that is syndicated and about, more organized form, corruption is a bit like an omnibus, as they used to say. You either get on it or if you stand in front of it, you get run over. And this is the point that you make. If the ones right in the bus, you can't really get off it so easily. So this is part of your deepening process of how it got from flies to tigers. Now, you did this what we're looking at. And also bearing in mind how much a Chinese minister and therefore tiger is being paid. And the official salary will not, I don't think covered the cause of the tuition fee, let alone tuition fee plus living cause of an offspring studying at say Harvard. And it's not an unreasonable expectation for an offspring of a Chinese minister to want to go to Harvard if he or she can make it there. Are we looking at a situation that in fact, we are not only talking about syndicate corruption but systemic corruption. That people is very difficult notch to be. And if it is the case and we're looking at syndicate corruption, then out of your 238 tigers, how many of those tigers belongs to people who had previously worked with or for Xi Jinping, political prodigies of some sort of Xi Jinping. Because if we're talking about systemic corruption, the chance that if you were a Xi prodigy, you would never have been involved in corruption. But if you were a non-Xi prodigy, you have a much higher chance that you just doesn't seem to hold water, does it? Well, this is the ultimate stumbling block of corruption. The answer is, we only know about those who get caught. We don't know about those who don't get caught. Do they not get caught because they're honest? Or do they not get caught because they're lucky? Or do they get caught but not prosecuted because they are beloved? They are beloved by those above them. Frankly, it does, of course, is striking that not many of Xi Jinping's prodigies have been prosecuted. But do we know that is because they are prodigies of Xi Jinping and he is protecting them? Or are they prodigies of Xi Jinping because they're honest? Frankly, short of being able to administer sodium pentothal to a large block of the central committee, I don't know. And I think this is the problem we deal with is we only are able to look at the percentage of corrupt officials the percentage of corrupt officials who get caught. There are those who have, there have been econometric studies done which seem to suggest that yes, if you are associated with Xi, you are less likely to be prosecuted. But again, I get back to it's a chicken and the egg question. Are they not prosecuted because they're guilty and he protected them? Are they not prosecuted because he selected them because they're honest? And I don't know the answer. To answer your other question, when you talk about syndicated corruption, of course, the ideas there and where we get the term syndicated corruption is from the Hong Kong police where the rank and file, the street, the beat police used to shake down various establishment, legal and otherwise, they would collect protection money. They would hand it over to the sergeant who would hand it over to the precinct captain and it would be handed on up the line. Another term for this, which is popular, what enjoyed a certain amount of popularity in recent years is kleptocracy. In other words, a state run by the corrupt for the purposes of corruption. If you look at, and I wrote a paper on this a number of years ago, published in the Journal of Democracy, kleptocracy basically posits that the state is a form of organized crime and that the person at the top is in effect the Godfather and that as the Godfather, he basically parcels out opportunities to his copos, his captains who in turn parcel out opportunities to those below him. I don't think that the Chinese state is a kleptocracy and I think this in part for the simple reason that we know a great deal about corruption in China because China fights corruption. For all of the shortfalls that the anti-corruption campaign might have, China has been fighting corruption since the 1950s and some may get caught, some might get protected, some might get away with it. But it's not like many of the other kleptocracies where we see you have a kleptocratic, a kleptocrat in chief, surrounded by his lieutenants, all of them raking off, if you go back to the kind of classic model of Zaire and their new booths, you don't have that in China and that was one of the paradoxes in my book which had to do with the contrast between corruption in Japan and Korea, Taiwan to a certain extent and the people's republic. I don't see the regime itself as completely corrupt but to answer your question in a very long-winded fashion, I have no reason to believe that Xi Jinping is corrupt. I don't know how he's managed to pay the Harvard tuition. I don't frankly know how I put my daughter through college either. My wife did that. But yeah, I mean, it's clear that official pay is a problem. If you have looked into official salaries in China, they're very complicated. The salary itself is the mere part of it. Bo Xi Lai said his wife had made all the money, maybe she did, maybe she didn't. But yeah, I mean, official pay is a problem. And when the head of China makes a fraction of what I as a professor make, that's a problem. And when the ministers make a fraction of what I make, that's a problem. The problem is this, how do you address that? If you're Xi Jinping, do you get on CCTV and say, look, my fellow Chinese, the problem is our officials are corrupt because we don't pay them enough. And therefore we should pay them more. In other words, corruption paid. Politically, that's a hard sell, even in China. So I think the answer is, yeah, you're right. Official pay is a problem. How do you deal with that? That's a political conundrum that fortunately I don't have to solve this Tuesday morning. Okay, let's move on to there are at least a dozen of questions that I have noticed already. Let me ask you a question that came in from Graham Hutchings. He says that much of your presentations depends on the analysis of cases from legal and party sources. How reliable is this information? Could it not simply be fabricated? How can we verify it? Second, do you know of any cases in which the official charge or tried confirm charges that has been found not guilty? Have you found any case of anybody being charged or tried who has been found not guilty? Thank you. Well, the answer to the first question is, tell me where else to look. I spent a lot of time reading this and I'm not only reading the Western press, but I'm not only reading the Chinese data, but also the Western press. If you look what comes out through outlets like South China Morning Post and others, they all trace back to the Chinese state. And the Chinese state has a monopoly on the original information. You can get rumors, you can get speculation, you can get very good investigations that have been done by Michael Forsythe and David Barbosa at New York Times, Chris Buckley also. And they look at a few cases. They look at the big case. And one of the things that has struck me in reading this data is, what appears in the English language press is just a tiny, tiny, tiny tip of a tip of a tip. There are great big cases out there that receive absolutely no notice outside of the Chinese legal system. So are they fabricated? It's quite a fabrication process to the one database I'm looking at has, I hate to say it has data on 100,000 corruption cases. It's a fabrication on a grand scale. And I think when you look at some of the top cases, they do get very spongy. I don't know if you've noticed, but with neither Bo Xilai nor Jo-Yong Khan, have they ever provided a start date? And there's a lot of detail that they leave out, particularly as the high level case. Do people get found innocent? Well, the answer is actually, it's a complicated answer because when you look at the corruption process, it's a multi-stage process. And so if you go back and think about my first figure, think of those hundreds of thousands of people who get investigated by the party. A fraction of them get referred to the procuratorate. They get a legal referral, cases remanded. It undergoes an investigation. It's a two-step process. They increase that process within the procuratorate. They accept a case for investigation. If they think the prima facie evidence supports formal investigation, they file the case and then eventually they seek an indictment. Beyond that, then of course they go to court. The gearing between those is quite substantial. The problem is they don't tell you about the 50% cut as they go from each level. Are these people found innocent? Are these people given administrative sanctions? A lot of people in the party gets what's called a party warning or a severe party warning. No one has ever been able to explain to me how a warning versus a severe warning differs. I guess it's a warning with a wag of a finger or something called glib answers. But yes, people do get found innocent. The problem is they simply don't report on it very often. Do people get found innocent at trial? The answer is very, very rarely. It's less than 1%. But I believe from what Steve said, I think the question is from someone at a legal firm. A good prosecutor in the United States never goes to court thinking they're gonna lose. They never go to court with a 50-50 chance. They wanna go with a near certain. Otherwise they'll try to plea bargain it and continue the investigation. So even in the U.S., if you get hauled into court, unless you're rich, powerful, and you're afforded really good lawyers, you're likely to be found guilty. And I would suggest in the case of China. Yeah, one of my favorite lines was reading about someone who had been arrested, had not on corruption charge. I forget where the charge was. And he was pleading his innocence to the interrogator and the interrogator said, well, how could you be innocent if I'm interrogating it? And I think once you're in the system, once the allegations have been made, your best bet is to try and bargain your way out with a plea bargain. But there's a tiny fraction of people who do get found innocent. But a considerable percentage of those who were investigated, in other words, have accusations made out against them, do not end up in court and do not end up in prison. But again, they simply, the party has never been a great share of information and they don't tell you, oh, 50% of the investigations we open prove to be completely false and untenable. They just don't do that. They just give you the number of investigations. It's up to you to guess what happened to them. The numbers fall through the process of the investigation, prosecution and conviction process. Okay. Next question from Norman Stockman. Is it possible to move beyond the study of corrupt individuals to networks of corruption? Could lower level corrupt individuals in quotation marks get away with it because of the connections to corrupt superiors? Well, it's the syndicate question. Yeah. One of the things that people or people myself included are always interested in is what are the interconnections between people? And here, I have tried to track them at the high level and it's problematic. I mean, in some cases, you're able actually to link people up who have been, if you look at Joey on concrete for example, you can map out a whole network of his protege and cronies, et cetera. My sense is when you get further down the food chain or the hierarchy, the same thing is true that people are not, in some cases, does not appear that they're hiding it. There's no way that a lot of these people could haul in the kinds of, and this mostly is the rats and wolves. Yeah, the rats and wolves. There's no way that they can hide what they're doing. And oftentimes you'll find that a case will evolve collusion between a number of individuals. The problem with answering your question kind of further is could they get away with it? Well, unless they get caught, they're getting away with it. And so we can't map those. Could you turn around and map someone's entire career network? And this is where you really get into a broader question is when you look at the top, if you look at the people that are, the couple of thousands who would be potential tigers, it's an incestuous group. A lot of these people have worked together. They have family connections. If you've risen up to the top of a very large party state hierarchy, you have a lot of former colleagues. You have a lot of people who were crotages. You probably have a lot of people who are your enemies. So the answer is networks clearly matter. But in looking at the tigers, the last time I looked, and it's a bit tedious to do given the software I have right now, and we're trying to transition the system that'll make it somewhat easier. I find that about a third of those of the tigers have no overt connection to any of the other tigers. So in effect, a third of them or more are what I would call free ranging tigers. By the way, in the wild tend to be free ranging anyway. And so the next part gets kind of tricky if you're an animal specialist. The others do seem to have connection. And connections do matter. Are those connections, are they in effect a mafia? And when I spent time looking at particularly the Jo-Yan Kang case, but also the Lin Chi Wa case is actually, in some ways, the more complex and interesting is. They seem to be parts of what I would call loosely organized bands of bandits. That they're all basically kind of freelancing, they're covering for each other, but they're not operating as a group. Now, having said that, if you look at the Yan Chi case, this one involving the Ching Ling, the Billows Belt and Ching Ling Nature Reserve, if you look at the Jiang Xi earthquake, there it does appear that you have these much more tightly organized syndicated corruption. But again, I look at them as, to go back to Steve's Professor Sange's question is, I don't see them organized all the way up. I see them as a series of localized syndicates operating independently of each other. So yeah, network is good. When you get down to the lower levels, it's very common in village cases. To see that it's the party secretary, it's the director, it's the accountant that are involved. Okay. Andrew, a couple of people have mentioned that you're fading away a little bit. So if you could sort of be a bit closer to the mic, that would be helpful. I'm much, much better. The next question that I picked from Jonathan Fenby, who wants to ask you about the politics behind the setting of targets, of targets not in terms of numbers, but targets of tigers to be taken down. How were they chosen? Is there politics behind? I think, well, I'm somewhat intimidated trying to answer a question by Jonathan Fenby, given his long experience in this area. My sense, and of course, I don't sit in on any of these meetings, is that before a tiger case gets too far down the road, the top is consulted. And what happens then? Is there a go-ahead? Are some people considered too sensitive? That's behind the curtain. That's something that I don't know. And I'm not sure how you would be able to pierce it. Because again, we don't know if the people being not being prosecuted are actually not corrupt. And if you look at some of the investigative work The New York Times has done, Bloomberg, you know, yeah, it does appear that, yeah, people must be making decisions that certain people are untouchable. But I think I would move to answer this in a somewhat broader fashion in that while we talk about corruption and corruption as being a specific crime, misuse of delegated authority, public authority in the case of officials. I think it's part of a larger issue in that, you know, when China starts the reform period back in the early 1980s, it has no millionaires. It has no billionaires. It really has no capitalist and entrepreneurs, no movers and shakers. All of those emerge out of the reform process. And in the process, it is certainly true that members of families, friends, old school comrades, et cetera, some become officials and some become wealthy. And so what I think that the bigger problem is, is that wealth and power in China is connected by blood, marriage, old school, Thai, et cetera. And that in the West, somehow we think at least that we have some way of separating wealth and power that they're in two separate spheres. I think in the case of China, they overlap the lines are fuzzy, to what extent have people taken advantage, to what extent have people connected with those with power, taken advantage of that power, whether it be in a toward or untoward manner. And I'll give you an example that always strikes me. We could talk about more contemporary ones, but I don't really wanna touch what's going on today. We have Chelsea Clinton. And I have nothing against Chelsea Clinton. I'm sure she's a very smart, able woman. But after she graduated, I forget, she had spent some time at either Cambridge or Oxford as I recall. She returned to the United States and she got a job at a hedge fund. Now, I am pretty certain that two weeks after she started, after she started, she didn't have coffee with her boss and her boss said, what? Your dad is Bill Clinton? I had no idea, because I hired you strictly on your merit. It happens in the United States. The sons and daughters program that J.P. Morgan got caught with a number of years ago, that's common to most political economies. Is it worse in China? Probably. Does that, and to answer your question, Jonathan, does that mean that people connected with people running the anti-corruption campaign or crackdown are themselves involved in activities that might be prosecutable? I would guess yes. How did they get out of jail free card? I don't know. But I would hazard that certainly it is true. Anything that's involving someone at the very top probably gets vetted by those at the very, very top before a decision is made to go forward or to go public. Of course, you can go after someone without telling people you went after them. Okay, I'll move on. We've got quite a lot of other questions. The next set of questions I'm going to raise is from one of our colleagues, Olivia Jones. She would like to ask you, what has Xi Jinping done to keep the disciplinary investigators under check? How does Xi Jinping guard the guardians? The second questions from her is that amongst those who were brought back to China for trial via the Fox Hunt or Skynet operations, who are they? Who are the Foxes? And relatedly, for those who were listed on Interpol as rat notice for corruption cases, how does that work? Who would qualify to be put on the rat list? And finally, is Xi Jinping sparing the princelings? Guarding the guards is, of course, a perennial problem. If you've been involved in corruption and you're facing an investigation and you're sitting on a pile of cash and facing the possibility of a 10 or 15 year prison sentence, your incentives to try and buy off the prosecutor, the investigators are fairly high. We certainly do have evidence of people in the justice system, in the disciplinary system taking bribes. One of the latest drives of late has been against corruption in the politics and law system. So they have gone after some prosecutors. They've gone after some others. You certainly do see a number of very senior judicial figures have been prosecuted, members of the high provincial court, et cetera. So guarding the guardians is always hard. And of course, the reorganization of the system back in 2017 from the combination of the Party Discipline and Inspection Commission, the State Ministry of Supervision, which in fact has been operating together since the early 1990s, and then creating this new supervisory commission by bringing in elements of the procuratorate, part of that is to try and more tightly guard and tightly monitor the guards of the system, if you will. Certainly he has tried things like trying to increase the centralization of the system, trying to make sure that local Party Discipline Inspection Commission answer more readily to Beijing than they do to the corresponding party committee at the other level. It's a perennial problem in China that goes back to Imperial days of how do you penetrate into a very large, sprawling party state. So yeah, they have taken measures, how effective they are. Again, it gets back to we know who gets caught. We don't know who doesn't get caught. So we don't know if a lot of the guards are getting away with it, or only a few of the guards getting prosecuted. Again, it's a very hard answer to the question. The Foxnet, Foxnet in the red notice question is quite interesting because if you go back, if you look at the hundred foxes that they originally listed, they're not a very impressive group. They're mid-level officials. They're low-level officials. Some of them aren't even officials in the sense that they were involved in various kinds of financial fraud and crimes. They have brought back and they like to, they make a big deal of when they get people back. Among those is, there are no very senior-level people in that list. Does that mean they're ones that have escaped overseas? I don't know because I would suspect that it wouldn't be that easy for a former provincial party secretary to simply pack up and move to Los Angeles or to Auckland or to Sydney. So again, it's one of these things we don't know. The red notice thing also gets complicated in that a red notice is actually just a kind of, oh, by the way, I'm looking for this person, please call me if you see them. For people in the United States, extradition is not possible. We don't have an extradition treaty with them, with the PRC. So, there are people in the US that the Chinese would like. Ling Jihua's brother is apparently somewhere in the United States. I think Chris Buckley tracked his down, his house somewhere in the San Francisco suburbs. The neighbors said they hadn't seen him in months. But in that case with Ling Wanzhen, I am told that the Chinese have asked the US government to try and track him down and send him back. They have not, as far as I know, put in a red notice for him. And again, what the US tells the Chinese is, well, just because you accuse someone of a crime, we can't deport them because we don't recognize the validity of a criminal charge in the face of China. I have talked to some people who've suggested that what the US has done is to tell the Chinese, we can't deport them for violations of law in China, but we can deport them for violations of law in the United States, including visa fraud, money laundering, and so forth. And of course, I have seen reports that the Chinese say that there are 14,000 fugitive officials. The number of people listed as foxes, the number of red notices out there do not come close to that number. So again, I don't know how many people are fugitives here. I don't know how many low-level people have escaped having gotten away with a little bit of corruption mode. Maybe not always a little bit. But yeah, the answer is again, that's one of those unknowables, imponderables that dodge the study of corruption. Okay, we have about 12 minutes left and I still have both 13 questions in the book. So if we could... I'll answer quickly. Thank you. The next one, two people ask in parallel similar questions. So I'll combine them together. And the question is really about the percentage of ethnic minorities or women who are being charged with corruption. How are they represented amongst the... Well, it is... Yeah, women are certainly do not appear to be in particularly large numbers. I think part of this is at the rank and file, the reporting often does not necessarily include identification of gender. And as a non-Chinese, I can't always figure out if somebody is, you know... So-and-so Jian Guo, you don't know. Most of the time you can probably guess it's probably a guy. I think one of the reasons you don't see as many women is that they don't get into positions of power. One of the things is to be corrupt, you have to have power. You need to have something in effect you can sell. I do know in the lower level cases, you see a lot of women who are cashiers, who are accountants, who are accused of investments. Could I give you a firm answer on the gender breakdown? No. But I would say that women are probably underrepresented partly because they're underrepresented in the ranks of power. The same probably of my ethnic minorities. I know, you know, I have... When you get into provinces that have larger ethnic minority populations, they certainly do come up more often but I don't have any concrete number. And again, it gets back to this problem of I don't know and I can't tell you what the actual rate of corruption is. I can only tell you what the revealed rate is. So I can only tell you about who gets caught. I can't tell you about who doesn't. And therefore I can't tell you if it's proportionate or disproportionate. Okay. Move to something quite different. And this is from Roger Macy. I have heard no mentioned of the sort of systemic methods for avoiding corruption, widely used elsewhere. I heard no mentioned of open competitive tendering or of the open competitive appointment and no independent auditors. Your suggestions is that all cases have arisen from suspicions and pointing at suspects. That is, the system depends on a perfect Marxist Leninist morality in all card rates and nothing I have heard has suggested what I would call a systemic response. Is that a valid summary or have I missed something? I'm not quite sure I understand the question. I think the question really is about if you're dealing with corruption, if you're dealing with eradicating corruption, there are alternative ways of dealing with it than the way how it's being done in China. And the kind of ways that are being done, for example, successfully in Hong Kong or Singapore or elsewhere, simply are not being done in China. Right, is that not correct? Yeah, it's actually a good question because if you go back to the early days of the campaign, 2013, 2014, we had a whole series of cases that involved internet revelations. People had gone through and searched property deeds. They had published pictures of Brother Watch. They had caught Sister House, et cetera. The party cracked down on that. And there was a regulation passed that if you posted something on the internet that was considered improper, if it got reposted a number of a couple of thousand times, you could be prosecuted. And after that regulation goes into effect, we see a dramatic drop in the number of these internet cases. I think very much what Xi Jinping did early on was he said, this is gonna be an internal campaign. This is not gonna be a mass campaign. We're not gonna involve the public in a active role. They certainly do, they maintain tip lines. If you get on the process tutorial website, if you get on the party discipline website, there are ways for you to file a complaint. And in their annual reports in the old days, the two of them used to tell you how many tips they got. They got a lot of tips, but then you didn't know what they did with the tips. But I think to answer the question is, they have shied away from allowing outside monitoring and outside auditing. If you have something to say, what they want you to do is to tell it to the party, let them process it, let them look into it. And if there's a case, then they'll do something about it. What happens to most of those? I think my sense is that, you may have a complaint box, but no one ever empties it. You may collect tips, but no one pays attention to them. They have not moved to basically make the party to increase scrutiny. So yeah, I mean, it is, you are reliant to get back to the earlier question. You're reliant on the willingness of the guards to go after suspected cases. And again, this is all behind the curtain, all in the black box. I am sure that lots of stuff gets left under the rug. I'm sure there's not perfect socialist morality among the discipline inspection people, but yeah, it is true to the extent that outside people were involved, they clamped down on that, but the public is involved, they're involved as an audience. And so the anti-corruption campaign, one of the reasons we know so much about this is the party publicizes it because the party publicizes it, this show that they're doing something about corruption. No independent investigations, absolutely true. No community monitoring, absolutely true. Okay. Next, I'm combining question from two persons from Rijigo and Catherine's. They're asking in parallel. The question is about what does the Chinese government do about to tackle foreign corruption? And in particular, the international projects in the Bevan Road Initiative countries. There are, the answer is two-fold is, one of the big things they do early in the campaign is they went after foreign pharmaceutical companies. Foreign pharmaceutical companies, as with pharmaceutical companies in general, they are notorious for handing out bribes and kickbacks. And the reason is, is that Chinese doctors are miserable and paid and they are very much willing as long as they can get rid of it, to take bribes. The Chinese crackdown on it, it was Glaxo Smith Klein, Mr. Humphreys and his wife that faced the real crackdown. There was a signal that, you know, there's no immunity. You can't hire a consultant and have the consultant pays the bribes and then say, well, all we did was to pay the consultant. They've gone after that internally. How much impact it's had, I think it's hard to tell because again, we see what we see but we don't see what we don't see. What have they done on the Bevan Road? And that, that gets tricky because, you know, crimes committed in Pakistan are crimes committed in China, in Pakistan. Can the Chinese prosecute them? In the case of the United States, we have something called foreign corrupt practices act. Great Britain has a similar one which allows you to prosecute your nationals or companies that are nationals in your country, allows you to prosecute them. China has not done a lot of that. And I think, you know, this gets back to their whole emphasis on sovereignty is that their attitude is if a crime is committed in your country, you prosecute it. I will say kind of the last gasp of this answer. I'm not sure China's teaching anybody in the Bevan Road anything new about corruption. I think a lot of them had schooled themselves quite well on that subject. And I think, you know, it's always, you put more money into a situation, you get more corruption. And I think that's what Belt and Road has done. Okay, we got two minutes left. So I'll ask you a very short question from Dominic Stevens. Some people say that Xi Jinping is a very rich man. So where does he get his money? Where does he get his wealth? Like Donald Trump, Xi Jinping has never showed me his tax returns. I don't know. Is he rich? How much money did Pung Lee Yuan make as a singer? She was a major general in the Chinese PLA. I presume she did not have the rights to royalty. I have no idea how much Xi Jinping has. And I have no way of ascertaining that. We do know his sister and her husband are quite wealthy. That is a, the whole question of that is somewhat separate. Does Xi Jinping walk around with a big wad of Redmond D in his pocket? I have no idea. I imagine he doesn't. But yeah, the answer to that is, I don't know if he's rich. Haven't sent his, my kid, haven't sent me his tax returns. Maybe I'll believe him and maybe I won't. But that's a question that would be very hard for anyone on the outside to answer. I thought that would be the answer. But nonetheless, I thought it was a rather interesting question. It's a fascinating question. I think a lot of Americans would like to know how much money our president has and we have no clue. Indeed, indeed. But on that theory note, I'm afraid we have run out of time and I must apologize to the other eight individuals who still have questions in the Q&A box that have not been addressed. But let us do thank Professor Andrew Waiterman for a very, very interesting and stimulating talk with us this evening in our time and in the morning, your time. Thank you, Andrew. I wanna thank you, Professor Tsang and all of the audience who I can't see, but I know there are quite a few of you at one point. Thank you for zooming in and have a good evening, afternoon, morning, middle of the night depending on where you are. Thank you very much. Thank you. Goodbye. Goodbye.