China Briefing | Raising civil servant pay will help reduce corruption
With basic salaries as low as 2,000 yuan a month, many government workers turn to corrupt practices to earn extra cash
As President Xi Jinping's unprecedented anti-graft crackdown goes wider and deeper, hardly a day goes by without revelations of the behaviour of corrupt officials who have found themselves in the crosshairs of investigators.
The latest example is the detention Wei Pengyuan, the deputy head of the coal bureau at the National Energy Administration.
He was found to have kept more than 100 million yuan (HK$126 million) in cash at home and police needed 16 money-counting machines from a Beijing bank to count the stash.
Four of the machines broke down during the process, presumably because of the intensity of the workload.
As mainlanders applaud the iron-fisted clampdown on rampant corruption among officials, one unfortunate side effect is that all civil servants have been tarred with the same brush.
Indeed, there is a long-standing saying among cynical mainlanders that if 10 officials were chosen at random and arrested on corruption charges, an investigation would most likely find that one or two at most were innocent.
In the eyes of many, officials have become public enemies for supposedly doing nothing but take bribes and gain benefits for themselves.