A report by China’s
central bank found that thousands of Chinese government officials have smuggled
billions out of the country and fled, mainly to the U.S., highlighting "the
corruption within a corrupt system".
By XinHaiguangE.O./Worldcrunch
BEIJING - Just how many
corrupt Chinese government officials have fled overseas? How much money have
they stashed away? And how did they manage to transfer such colossal sums
abroad?
Last week the Bank of China published a report entitled
“How corrupt officials transfer assets overseas, and a study of monitoring.”
The report quoted statistics based on research by the ChineseAcademy
of Social Sciences. Since 1990, the number of Communist Party and government
officials, public security members, judicial cadres, agents of State
institutions, and senior management figures of state-owned enterprises fleeing China has
reached nearly 18,000. Also missing is about 800 billion yuan
(more than $120 billion).
The Bank of China emphasized the fact that
nobody, up to now, has been able to provide an authoratitive
figure of the exact sum pilfered, and the recent figure of 800 billion yuan is only an estimate. It is nonetheless an astronomical
sum. It is equivalent to China’s
total financial allocation for education from 1978 to 1998. Each official
stole, on average, an estimated 50 million yuan (more
than $7 million). Precisely because this is only an estimate, one can imagine
the real numbers are actually much bigger. Some media have reported that the
wife of the Deputy Chief Engineer of the Ministry of Railways, Zhang Shuguang, recently caught for corruption, owns three luxury
mansions in Los Angeles, and has bank savings of as much as $2.8 billion in
America and Switzerland. This gives a glimpse of the broader picture.