China Briefing | What happened to the billions of yuan seized in China’s anti-graft campaign?

In February 1980, Wang Shouxin, the party secretary of a local fossil fuel company in Heilongjiang, was executed on the same day she was convicted of bribery to the tune of 530,000 yuan (HK$615,000).

Her show trial, billed as the largest corruption case since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, took place in a stadium filled with more than 5,000 people and was faithfully documented by reporters and photographers.

To put the scale of her offence in context, the average monthly salary of a worker was around 50 yuan.

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Since then, thanks to reforms and the open-door policy, the Chinese economy has grown exponentially – and along with it the brazenness and greed of corrupt officials. They have gone from extracting bribes worth millions in the 1990s and tens of millions in the first decade of this century to hundreds of millions of yuan today. The higher the official’s rank, the bigger the bribes.

According to state media, since President Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his anti-graft campaign in late 2012, about 37 officials with the rank of deputy government minister or above have been convicted of corruption. Together, their cases account for 3 billion yuan’s worth of bribes. Bai Enpei, the former party secretary of Yunnan ( 雲南 ), has the dubious honour of having taken the most – about 250 million yuan, according to public records.

Xi’s campaign targeting both “tigers and flies” – powerful leaders and lowly bureaucrats – has netted thousands of officials, so the total sum of bribes runs at least into several tens of billions of yuan, if not hundreds of billions.

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Exact figures are hard to come by, but an official from the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said in a rare interview last year that the anti-graft watchdog alone had confiscated a total of 20.1 billion yuan from corrupt officials between late 2012 and June last year.