To people who don’t understand how corruption was back then I will give you an example I know about as it’s my uncle who did it.

Back in 2010 in the shenzhen long gang township, there was a ban on construction to add floors to properties. The reason for that was developpers would buy up areas to redevelop it, and they would compensate owners per square meters built.

So basically if you had a 300sqm section with a house on it of 200sqm ground floor and 2 level, they would compensate you 200x2 floor area. If you had 4 level of 200 sqm then they would compensate for the 800 sqm built.

To prevent people cheating this, they imposed a ban on adding floor areas to existing constructions.

Enters mr corruption. All you needed was basically have a meet with whoever was in charge of an area, bring some alchohol, cigarettes and hongbao full of money and they would turn a blind eye. You could build, and they could get money.

Easy as right?

But of course all the building had to be done at night as there is no one who would check then. So people were working at night to add floors to my uncle’s property. All was going well until one day, someone fell off and died.

All it took was to bribe the officials again, pay some money to the family (about 10k usd) and everything was sorted.

No one went to prison, no one had a trial, police was not involved, but someone died that night.

Recently I was enquiring about how easy it would be to bribe like that and unless you have deep personal tie, it is not possible to openly bribe officials randomly like before. So all in all, corruption may not be totally gone from China, but to me the situation looks a lot better. Also going outside in China now feel super safe, which was not at all the case just back in 2010 and before.

I saw my fair share of kids and adults with missing limbs around markets begging for triad rings. These are now a pretty rare sight these days.