My Take | Hong Kong economist offers sobering thoughts on corruption in China

Is corruption in China out of control? Many people would say yes. Some would say no. A few, including myself, would say I don't know.

Corruption in China has always been a prime news item but especially so now that the anti-corruption campaign by President Xi Jinping has gone into overdrive.

In his personal blog, University of Science and Technology economist Francis Lui Ting-ming recently offered a fascinating insight.

The professor begins with an observation often repeated on the mainland: The failure to crack down on corruption would lead to the nation's collapse; but to really crack down on corruption would lead to the Communist Party's collapse.

Lui thinks this is vastly exaggerated. After all, Lui implies that many Chinese only know about corruption in their own country and no others, so they have no point of comparison.

Meanwhile, many Western democrats think China is corrupt because it is not Western and is undemocratic. But this is inadequate because corruption exists in Western and/or democratic societies.