Watches, mistresses on show as China highlights graft
Lurid reports of Chinese officials sporting luxury watches or promoting their twin mistresses are being hailed by state media as proof of a corruption crackdown -- but real reforms remain a distant prospect.
Less than a month after Xi Jinping ascended to China’s most powerful post as head of the Communist Party and proclaimed the scourge of graft an existential threat to the ruling organisation and the country, official outlets are striving to show action is being taken.
A web page run by the Communist party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, hailed their fall as “the start of an anti-corruption storm”.
But the breadth and depth of the campaign are still unclear, even as corruption threatens the ruling party’s claim to legitimacy -- a recent Pew Research Center survey found 50 per cent of Chinese considered official graft a very big problem.
Since Xi’s promotion after the Communist Party Congress, a motley parade of lower-level officials have been featured by state-run media after being exposed, including a police chief being investigated for allegedly keeping twins as mistresses and giving one a local government job.