China’s Anti-Graft Show Is Educational, With Unintended Lessons

1) It’s awesome to be a Chinese official

Officials can enjoy many perks, big and small, get all their whims pampered and live a privileged lifestyle that even money can’t buy.

A former vice minister of public security, Sun Lijun, who oversaw the nation’s police force, recounted how he used to receive four or five boxes of “seafood” each year from a provincial police official. In each box, there would be $300,000 in U.S. currency, totaling $15 million over the years.

“Every time he said he would deliver some seafood, I would know what it was about,” he said, smiling throughout his interview.

Wang Fuyu, formerly a deputy party secretary in Hainan Province and later in Guizhou Province, asked businesspeople to buy him houses in three cities for different seasons: winter on tropical Hainan Island, summer in the cool Guizhou Plateau and spring and fall in the southern city of Shenzhen. An avid golfer, he had a mansion on a golf course and could start swinging as soon as he stepped out of his door.

Chen Gang, Beijing’s longtime deputy mayor who studied at China’s top architecture school, used some of his $20 million in ill-gotten gains to fund a garden complex in the city’s suburbs that he designed. The complex, the documentary said, occupied 18 acres of land and included a Chinese courtyard, a Western-style all-glass mansion, a Japanese garden, an artificial white-sand beach, a theater and a spa.

The Chinese public was both fascinated and appalled by the unusually candid exposé.

Some social media users joked that the series felt like a recruiting commercial for civil servants, or a how-to guide to bribery. Others wondered why the documentary’s subjects spoke with so little remorse, even sounding boastful at times.

Some commentators suggested that perhaps the party should introduce real checks and balances, since the campaign seemed ineffective. Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Chen, as well as many other officials among the 16 cases featured in the series, took the majority of their bribes after Mr. Xi took power in late 2012, the documentary said.