By Russell Leigh Moses
Ling Jihua, left, once an aide to former Chinese President Hu Jintao, faces charges of bribe-taking and obtaining state secrets.
 
European Pressphoto Agency
The expulsion of former Chinese presidential aide Ling Jihua from the Communist Party underlines that high-level officials are as vulnerable to Beijing’s ongoing anticorruption crusade as lower-ranking ones.
What the move doesn’t address is why these cadres engage in corruption to start with.
Last Friday, an article appearing on the website of the Party’s flagship newspaper,People’s Daily, tried to supply some answers—by quoting the culprits themselves.
Overall, the People’s Daily account paints the offending officials as not very principled and not very convincing.
One of the officials quoted was Liu Tienan, former deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, who last December was sentenced to life in prison.

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According to the People’s Daily, Liu said that he accepted bribes because he had anxiety about old age and was worried about where he would end up after he retired. It was mainly this uncertainty about “his later years” that drove him to malfeasance, Liu claimed.
For other officials, being corrupt was simply standard practice.
A former vice-mayor in the city of Meishan in China’s southwest Sichuan province argued that not accepting offers of monetary assistance “would have been seen as abnormal, as well as a rejection of someone else’s ‘good intentions.’” Declining to go with the flow, according to this official, “wouldn’t have been good for my work, and it would have rendered further promotion out of the question.”
His fellow lawbreaker, Tan Xinsheng, former deputy mayor of Tongnan in the megacity of Chongqing, agreed that taking bribes was commonplace. “My motive wasn’t for the money itself, but because it’s normal job behavior to accept gifts and payments when offered them,” insisted Tan, who is currently serving twelve years for corruption. Another offender, a vice mayor from Shanxi province, said he accepted 2 million yuan because he thought the person bribing him merely wanted to be close friends and that the money was a reflection of the two of them “hitting it off,” as he put it.
Other cadres were cast in the article as more creative in their confessions about why they became corrupt.
For example, a former deputy governor in Shandong province stole over 5.6 million yuan during his tenure. When he was caught, the article noted, the official declared that nearly all of the money he accepted had simply been set aside – and that he was in principle saving money for the country.

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Then there’s Xu Jing, a teacher overseeing the establishment of a computer science center at the Beijing University for Industry. She embezzled more than 9 million yuan, and used a third of that amount to fund her daughter studying abroad. According to the article, Xu maintained that using the money to send her daughter overseas to study was compatible with “the national program to nurture talent for the country” and therefore shouldn’t be considered corruption.
The People’s Daily – considered the Party’s official mouthpiece — presents these confessions as genuine and warns officials that “only through sincere repentance is there a road to a magnanimous life.”
Such instruction might strike some readers as uplifting, if only because it suggests a willingness to forgive past transgressions.
But some cadres and citizens in China might well wonder when they’ll get to see something more than just retribution–that is, the sort of political reform that would not only thwart corruption, but prevent pathetic people like those here from gaining power to start with.
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.