Money in Politics, at Top and Bottom

Evan Osnos examines the role of bribery in elections for some of China’s more potentially lucrative local positions, and its implications for the health of these democratic experiments. From The New Yorker:




The price of an iPad would be unlikely to sway China’s top legislators. Last month, the spotlight fell on surprisingly low nominal salaries awarded to Chinese officials such as Hu Jintao, whose $11,000 is dwarfed by the $400,000 Barack Obama received each year. Bloomberg shows the other side of the coin:



The income gain by NPC members reflects the imbalances in economic growth in China, where per capita annual income in 2010 was $2,425, less than in Belarus and a fraction of the $37,527 in the U.S. The disparity points to the challenges that China’s new generation of leaders, to be named this year, faces in countering a rise in social unrest fueled by illegal land grabs and corruption.

“It is extraordinary to see this degree of a marriage of wealth and politics,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “It certainly lends vivid texture to the widespread complaints in China about an extreme inequality of wealth in the country now.”