China Briefing | Corrupt officials keep forcing China to raise the bar for death penalties as it ‘scrapes poison off the bone’

Lai Xiaomin’s execution last year for taking more than US$260 million in bribes seems to have set a new minimum for triggering capital punishment

China mostly condemns murderers and rapists to die. But the Communist Party has a long history of handing down death sentences to corrupt officials

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Anyone convicted of embezzling or taking bribes worth more than about US$443,000 can be punished by death under the law in China, but the authorities have spared some officials who took more. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 9:00am, 23 Jul 2022Updated: 12:45pm, 23 Jul 2022

If there’s one thing that defines China’s leader Xi Jinping’s 10-year reign, then it’s probably his signature anti-corruption campaign that he has used to consolidate power and bolster discipline and loyalty.

The oft-repeated slogan “scraping poison off the bone” denotes his determination to root out corruption, borrowing from a well-known Chinese folktale in which a legendary general had a doctor cut into an old arrow-wound to scrape out poison that had seeped to the bone.

Over the past 10 years, the Communist Party’s anti-corruption agency has investigated and punished 4.7 million members, many of whom received lengthy jail sentences. A handful were made examples of and executed for embezzling egregious amounts of money. The most notorious case involved Lai Xiaomin, a former top banker, who was executed in January last year for taking a staggering 1.79 billion yuan (US$264.6 million) in bribes – earning him the dubious honour of being the official convicted for receiving the largest amount of kickbacks in the history of the People’s Republic.

Lai Xiaomin, former chairman of China Huarong Asset Management, before his execution for corruption on January 29, 2021. Photo: Weibo

But he may not hold that title for long. Rumours are swirling that the Chinese leadership intends to soon make an example of another disgraced senior official - who is believed to have pocketed an even larger sum than Lai - in time for the 20th party congress, scheduled for sometime in the autumn, where Xi is expected to seek a norm-busting third term as party chief.

China is commonly believed to carry out more executions than any other nation, though the exact number is a state secret. Most of those put to death are murderers and rapists. But the party has a long history of condemning corrupt officials to die for the sheer size of the bribes they received.

Trawling through official media reports reveals a fascinating history of the party’s attempts to deploy capital punishment as a means of deterring and combating corruption. More than anything, it shows that the authorities have had to repeatedly raise the bar for what qualifies a corrupt official to be sentenced to death as the size of the bribes taken got ever more outrageous.

Back in 1952, China’s then-leader Mao Zedong approved the execution of two former senior officials in Tianjin for misappropriating and embezzling the equivalent of about 1.7 million yuan in today’s money - an astronomical sum back then when most Chinese people barely had enough to eat.

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