Hello Mike, <<Are you serious? Won’t a guy who is this well-connected be able to avoid capital punishment?>>
This note is for mature readers only.
Yes, I am quite serious. There are plenty of economic crimes happening in China these days, ranging from tax evasion, value-added tax rebate fraud, smuggling, to money laundering, pilfering, thieving, and all manner of stock market related crimes and shenanigans.
The non-Chinese reader is not generally aware of the scale, variety, and followup stories of these matters. The English language press rarely reported the stories in any detail.
The Mainland Chinese press is actually quite juicy these days (last 5 years) and the stories on political and economic corruption are covered regularly. There are even magazines devoted only to such stories! The local, regional and national judicial organizations publish the magazines as supplementary cash earners. And dirt sells magazines. I buy them sometimes out of ghoulish curiousity, before getting on airplanes, and leave them for the next passenger when I disembark. I actually buy them to get a sense of where the market white-collar crime knowledge level is, as part of my clientele definitely suffered from economic crimes. As mentioned before, a lot of my divestment work involves power stations and disgruntled investors.
The stories tend to have a beginning, middle and an end. Economic crimes over a certain amount (say generally around US$ 120k, and especially if one recruited a network and obstruct investigation/justice process) tend to end the same way, with a USD 6 cent lead projectile. The beginning of the stories tends to be the same … young man/woman doing good 20 years ago, then turned bad, got inventive, creative, and progressively more bold and careless.
The wrong-doers are caught in a variety of ways, some more interestingly than others. The central government’s State Security Ministry stations people in Macao gambling casinos, video camera in hand, paying special attention to Mandarin (Macao operates in Cantonese dialect) speaking northern Chinese visitors with big pile of gambling chips (hundreds of thousands of USD, say), and then initiates an investigation. A bunch of mayors, and some provincial governors were caught this way. Others are caught because they tried to buy off the wrong person, or made a wrong enemy.
These stories typically involve health-debilitating episodes with too much food, liquor, and women. One guy drank so much that he needed to use a small portion of his ill-gotten rewards to pay for liver transplant. The stories about the girls are fun as well.
These folks are typically quite well educated, and then they lost perspective and balance. They generally deeply regret how they went wrong.
One guy roped in his family members into his doings, brought jail sentences to them all, and a death sentence to himself. He was a classical scholar of sort and wrote about his entire experience while awaiting execution in the form of a letter to his family. It was a sad story of early promise, subsequent greed, downfall, and the wait (around 60 days) during which he wakes up at night, hoping all is a nightmare, and absolute, uninhabited regret.
One reporter wrote a story where he interviewed a batch of death-role economic criminals during their wait (they actually do not know when) and got each to tell him his/her story from beginning to end, along with what they have as advise for readers, and what they have to say to family members. The descriptions, together with photographs of the lead-up to the end is at the same time heart aching, mind searing, soul probing, and terrifying. Happy youth, promising career, wrong steps, worse leaps, caught, attempts at cover-up, evidences, court case, judgement, wait, decision on appeal, wait, wait, and out of the blue, a final haircut, finishing change of clothing, concluding family visit, and last meal. The prisoners do get to choose their absolute last meal. One guy ordered a carton of ice cream.
The family used to have to pay for the bullet. Now it is free.
Do such stories prevent crime to some extent? For the marginal criminal, I think so. Others, I think not, and then they are gone.
I think the law is more enforced than not because the Communist Party wishes to stay in power.
Chugs, Jay |
