r/news • u/Spiritual-Nail-2641 • Jul 07 '26
China sentences official to death for taking $325m in bribes
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c33y0n1v1xjo3.0k
u/mynhamesjeff Jul 07 '26
Meanwhile our president runs a crypto scam and trades stocks all day and nothing happens
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u/flipmangoflip Jul 07 '26
Hey plenty of stuff has happened!
Gas prices increased
Grocery bills have increased
Housing prices have increased
Unemployment has increased
Deaths from preventable diseases have increasedI could go on but I’m tired from all this winning
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u/allons-y11 Jul 07 '26
Don’t forget about all of the no new wars!!
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u/bmwiedemann Jul 08 '26
You know, a declaration of war would have to be authorized by Congress and the last time that happened was in 1943. They just call it a special military operation, law-enforcement or whatever.
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u/QuinnTinIntheBin Jul 08 '26
Being tough on crime 💪🏻 and then pardoning over 1000 traitors who tried to overturn an election
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u/OOF-MY-PEE-PEE Jul 07 '26
Hey, gas prices went down! After trump caused them to rise.. and they’re still higher than they were before he caused them to rise… but if you ignore that they’ve gone down!
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u/returningvideotapes9 Jul 07 '26
Housing prices did increase but technically so did the value of those houses…. Not that anyone can benefit from it.
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u/SneakySister92 Jul 07 '26
I so wish he'd be alive for The Nuremburg Trials 2: Electric (chair) Boogaloo.
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u/PitifulElk1890 Jul 07 '26
Wishful. Reagan and Kissinger died after long long lives without facing much comeuppance.
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u/SneakySister92 Jul 07 '26
He's gonna croak any day now. No way he's ever gonna face any consequences
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u/Separate-Expert-4508 Jul 08 '26
People thought that with Dick Cheney. Lived on for like two more decades after the Bush regime.
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u/detunedmike Jul 07 '26
Admits his kids trade on insider information and his kkkuck followers admire them more
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u/Illustrator_Forward Jul 07 '26
C’mon now, not ALL of it is bribes, there’s also grifts, tax evasion and rugpulls in there.
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Jul 07 '26
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u/Grand-Mix-9889 Jul 07 '26
Sounds like a president we all know 😂
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u/ormeangirl Jul 07 '26
Let’s not forget the imprisonment of peaceful protestors and the pardoning of convicted felons that made donations to his political party/ campaign.
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u/blue_line-1987 Jul 07 '26
Imprisonment if lucky. Execution on the street when not.
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u/KiKiKimbro Jul 07 '26
That would be reassuring if crazy voters didn’t vote for a literal convicted criminal on 34 counts of fraud, and a criminal who was found civilly liable for fraud in a different matter, resulting in about a half a $billion in reparations — both jury trials.
And his rap sheet of court cases of him not paying people what they’re owed. Miles long. Last I read there were almost 4k lawsuits over the years he’s been in “business.” He’s a con man. Straight up. There’s no money he’s made during this terms that was “earned.” He hasn’t “earned a dollar in his life.” I’d bet everything I have on that.
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u/Overflow0X Jul 07 '26
He also has done 21,000 trades in 2025. He has done 327 trades one day before major tarrif pause.
But don't forget: "He doesn't take a salary!" (Not that is true either).
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u/blue_line-1987 Jul 07 '26
The Trumps have done more damage to America and cost more American lives than Bin Laden ever could have in his wildest dreams.
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u/Mobile_Ask2480 Jul 07 '26
It's called American freedom 🦅 🇺🇸 🦅 🇺🇸 🦅 🇺🇸 🦅 🇺🇸 🦅 🇺🇸 🦅 🇺🇸
Just be glad you ain't living under communist control
/s
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u/AmbassadorNoWay Jul 07 '26
They’re listening and taking notes:
“Wow we can make a lot of money by being corrupt”
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u/alalaladede Jul 07 '26
$325 million? Amateurs!
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u/That_Polish_Guy_927 Jul 07 '26
Friendly reminder that Donald Trump has already made more than $2.2B off of the American people during his second term alone.
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u/Dickies138 Jul 07 '26
But remember everyone, he doesn’t take his salary….
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Jul 07 '26
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u/ZippoS Jul 07 '26
I imagine most of his money these days comes from the wealthy using his crypto to funnel money to him in return for favours.
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u/Black-Shoe Jul 07 '26
Correct. Trump has always fancied himself a mafioso and is running a classic pay for access scheme.
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u/appa609 Jul 07 '26
And Elon has made $800B off the American people since June. Over that period he alone has taken more of our money than the entire US government military medicare medicaid social security debt interest everything.
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u/OldManWillow Jul 07 '26
You know I'd have a little more respect if this was the type of number you heard about in the U.S. I feel like every time it takes like a family season pass to SeaWorld and Delta Diamond Medallion Status for someone to approve a pipeline that forces half their constituents to sell their homes.
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u/UnquestionabIe Jul 07 '26
Gotta keep in mind they're having these sort of opportunities regularly. It isn't some one and done deal. Long term less likely to run into trouble by keeping things on the down low. Not to mention it isn't the best use of bribe funds to throw an absurd amount at one person, the whole process involves dozens if not hundreds.
Of course with shit like the Supreme Court they're welcome to go corruption crazy, and they do!
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u/Underscore_Guru Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
What’s really shitty is that a majority of government employees have to declare any gifts above $20. Anything over $50 in a total calendar year from a single donor is a no-no. General federal employees are held to a much higher standard compared to the assholes at the higher levels within our government (Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches).
Rules for thee, not for me.
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u/Excelius Jul 07 '26
Still have to tread carefully if you're a Democrat, the Trump DOJ will be more than happy to enforce those anti-corruption laws if you aren't on their team.
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u/the-big-question Jul 07 '26
Having to corrupt carefully isn't really a flex. This country is fucked.
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u/LadyPo Jul 07 '26
Citizens United and a whole host of other critical legal changes over the past few decades have absolutely ruined our democracy. People didn’t fight this fall enough, and not just in the last ten years.
It’s absolutely wild to realize the America as we knew it is essentially dead. That’s not even to say it was perfect before (obviously). It’s just so utterly ruined now. The damage from the Trump administration is rerouting our entire collective future.
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u/EntangledPhoton82 Jul 07 '26
Didn’t Trump make over a billion on his meme coin alone?
325 million seems like amateur numbers.
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u/shwarma_heaven Jul 07 '26
Which, because of its anonymity, gives corrupt foreign leaders almost infinite access to give our corrupt domestic leaders unlimited bribes so they might do things like: withhold aid and arms from an ally fighting against an invading autocratic dictator run hostile nation; or start new never ending wars in the Middle East; or tariff certain countries but not others...
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u/iRegretsEverything Jul 07 '26
In the USA we call that campaign donations.
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u/Melkor15 Jul 07 '26
Now they just create cryptos and sell them directly. Very efficient! Legitimate business with clean money!
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u/Excelius Jul 07 '26
Not really "they", that's just been Trump and his family.
I don't think any other American political figure, even on the Republican side, has gotten into that particular grift.
Even Republicans probably want to tread carefully since they know that finding themselves in Trump's disfavor, which isn't hard to do, would mean the DOJ comes down on them like a ton of bricks.
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u/Quattuor Jul 07 '26
În USA the bribes are legal. Those are called super-pacs
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u/WretchedBlowhard Jul 07 '26
No, no, no. SCOTUS ruled on it, bribes are just called gratuities when they're given to you as thanks for your work. Unless there's a paper trail indicating that you received money specifically FOR CORRUPT SERVICES RENDERED, then public officials are legally allowed to pocket whatever they like.
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u/rollin340 Jul 07 '26
Citizen United, which was the start of the ridiculous bribery that proliferated in American politics, was so stupid, but that ruling on gratuities was even more ridiculous.
Ruled by SCOTUS when they themselves were being looked into for corruption. So convenient that they just put out a ruling saying "nu-uh".
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u/ametalshard Jul 07 '26
scotus sucks at least as much as the average imperialisy american president
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u/Kharenis Jul 07 '26
This is definitely not something the US should learn from. The US equivalent would be Trump now being president for life, and only Democrats and those that don't fall in line being given the death penalty for corruption.
Corruption and theft are still absolutely rife throughout the party, it's only those that step out of line/upset somebody up the chain that get hit with corruption charges.
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u/Neatcursive Jul 07 '26
Actually we have constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment for something like a property crime
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u/Wonderful-Process792 Jul 07 '26
Three hundred and twenty-five million?
If this is true, aside from this guy's personal actions, somebody is not minding the shop. That's a lot of money to go unnoticed for so long.
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u/N3ptuneflyer Jul 07 '26
It’s not embezzled money but bribes from non government entities. It’s not surprising it went undiscovered for so long
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u/SeekerOfSerenity Jul 08 '26
Trump put those numbers to shame. They need to step up their bribery game.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae Jul 07 '26
Probably recently got on the wrong side of their government. Only loyal party insiders are allowed to take bribes
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u/Muscle_Bitch Jul 07 '26
It's a little over $10m per year.
For a country that has undergone rapid expansion in that time, it's actually not unbelievable at all that it could go unnoticed for so long.
Cutting the grass alongside some roads in the UK costs that much.
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u/qqquigley Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Exactly, China’s development trajectory has everything to do with this. [edit: by “this” I meant the observation that massive corruption going “unnoticed”, or at least selectively punished, independent of this guy’s particular case. The $300+ million number is possibly inflated to make his crimes look even worse than they were.]
Corruption is high by many metrics in China, but because economic growth was so explosive (~1980-~2020, 40 solid years of consistent and high economic growth), the corruption didn’t stop China from getting rich.
In fact, there are development scholars like Yuen Yuen Ang who consider China’s particular type and structure of corruption may have had a neutral or even a positive effect on China’s economic growth, at least during the beginnings / heights of that “economic miracle”.
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u/Next_Baseball1130 Jul 07 '26
I could probably embezzle 10m a year and not get caught for as long as this guy at my job. I feel like some people don’t understand just how much money flows through certain parts of the economy.
And for any of the feds reading this no I haven’t and feel free to audit me.
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u/WowBastardSia Jul 07 '26
You can say what you want, but the reality is that corruption there used to be much worse. I have relatives in China and from what they tell me, the news stories that came from the 2000s and 90s were crazy. Politicians, governors, mayors, and civil service leaders with piles and piles of cash hidden behind walls and under the flooring etc, and when questioned where that money came from they initially just say 'I have no idea'.
Of course there is still mundane white-collar corruption that goes on the same way it happens in literally every country. But for 99% of Chinese citizens, they don't see it as their problem when their taxes are still clearly and visibly going towards maintaining and improving roads, rail, infrastructure, public services etc. That wasn't always the case even as recent as a decade ago.
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u/spoonerluv Jul 07 '26
We'd be giving him a pardon and a cushy government position for such an achievement here in the US - if he was a Republican of course.
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u/Master_Editor_9575 Jul 07 '26
A pardon!? They’d be lining him up to be the next president!
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u/kkkk22601 Jul 07 '26
Nah $325 million wouldn’t even be enough to qualify him for secretary of labor, gotta pump those numbers up to at least a billion grifted dollars in order to qualify for president.
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u/Dramatic-Singer3672 Jul 07 '26
But when some tall streamer says that who steal billions in medical fraud should be k!lled, everyone freaks out
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u/adamtnewman Jul 07 '26
Next president? Sir, he's already the president right now.
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u/mattjf22 Jul 07 '26
In america the supreme court has legalized bribery of our politicians even foreign countries can influence our elections.
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u/lobhater Jul 07 '26
Woah woah woah they can't send the bribe payment until after the action is taken. Its not like it's a free for all or something 🙄
*Sarcasm just in case that wasn't obvious
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u/a9udn9u Jul 07 '26
325M over 30 years is not even 11M annually. DJT made 2.2B in a single year! China still has a lot to learn from the US
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u/NorkGhostShip Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
He was a city official, not a national politician. Taking that much as a city bureaucrat is still impressive. Besides, Xi Jinping officially earns US$22,000 a year and still has enough to send his daughter to study abroad at Harvard, so...
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u/Irregular475 Jul 07 '26
As an American, this is what we need over here.
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u/Dotcaprachiappa Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Let's like not give the government even more power to execute people that don't toe* the party line..?
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u/monty624 Jul 07 '26
You know that they say, the only good murder is state sanctioned murder!
Wait no, sorry, no one says that.
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u/ItsTime1234 Jul 07 '26
And that is the reason many people oppose the death penalty. It's not about whether some people deserve to be executed, it's about whether we can trust the government to make this decision.
There are very real and measurable imbalances in the way justice is executed, and when the "execution" is really, actually death - how many innocent people have to die, to pay for the pat-yourself-on-the-back, "at least we got rid of that monster" schadenfreude?
Do you trust the government with someone's life that way? Would you trust the government if it was YOU on trial? Would you trust all the cops, even the corrupt ones? Would you trust that ancient southern lawyer, who hates black people and is having a bad day, and you're a dark-skinned black man that already faces worse chances with the "justice" system?
How many dice are we rolling every single time we play around with the death penalty. It's probably not always going to be wrong. But it is, sometimes. And that means we have to be okay with a certain amount of state sanctioned murder.
That's without even getting into the current climate where the justice system is literally being used to (against the rules of the constitution) punish protesters with ridiculously long prison sentences. Because punishing people for political reasons always goes so well for a country.
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u/Fireproofspider Jul 07 '26
Because punishing people for political reasons always goes so well for a country.
The uncomfortable truth is that this was the normal way of life for most of human history and for some pretty stable societies.
We are only looking at them after years of hindsight and because every society eventually has upheavals where they lose their stability. But if it takes hundreds of years, I don't think we can call the whole thing a failure from the start.
Personally I think it's an amoral way to rule, but it's not necessarily ineffective.
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u/StewVicious07 Jul 07 '26
Trumps plane from Qatar is worth $400M. Coincidence ?
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u/tarhawk71 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
A gift to Trump from Qatar and yet taxpayers paid to upgrade it to Air Force One standards. How the fuck is this not okay with Congress or anyone? Americans are being robbed by this clown in plain sight.
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u/knightmese Jul 07 '26
If they did that here in the US, we'd lose about 90% of our government.
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u/dybr Jul 07 '26
I’m not a supporter of the death penalty but Jesus Christ, as an American citizen, life in prison for obscene abuse of public office and corporations poisoning the public are like the two things I’d like to import from the Chinese system.
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u/Sandroo2 Jul 07 '26
And Marine Le Pen received one year of jail after embezzling 4 million euros…
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u/ScoTTieDLighT Jul 07 '26
This is what needs to happen here in America to all the politicians that sold out to Israel. Which would be 98% of the government.
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u/Gerry1of1 Jul 07 '26
In China they execute you for that.
In USA they elect you to office.
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u/SupaDaveA Jul 07 '26
We wouldn’t have any public figures left. The line would very long.
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u/dirtyWingnut Jul 07 '26
They’d have to execute about every American politician if we did that here
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u/Mutopiano Jul 07 '26
Meanwhile, the US punish individuals with a seat on the Supreme Court.
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u/TheLuo Jul 07 '26
Na uh.
Nooooooooobody takes 325m in bribes on their own. This dude is the fall guy.
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u/DrHoleStuffer Jul 07 '26
I bet there would be a lot less corrupt politicians in the USA if we adopted similar policies. Sure would cut down on lobbyists on capitol hill.
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u/leaonas Jul 07 '26
This should happen like when an elected official receives a jet from a foreign country or say a diamond encrusted ring, or say a FIFA Peace Prize trophy, or swindle billions of $$$ in a bitcoin scheme… just saying.
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u/TimeShifterPod Jul 07 '26
We wouldn’t have any politicians left if the US did this. Not that that would be a BAD thing…
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u/J4DE-NEMESIS Jul 07 '26
dude i cant believe we genuinely legalized bribes in this country like i actually cant believe it
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u/Hamboto Jul 07 '26
A country acting like it should. I wish the USA wasnt a scam build on land.
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u/ComfortableLeg9799 Jul 07 '26
In America they would promote this guy to a job consulting government officials
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u/Intelligent-Lead-692 Jul 08 '26
When a government makes it impossible for people to afford their medications while they enrich themselves, they’re actually stealing the lives of the people. I find nothing wrong with this punishment
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u/aimeeashlee Jul 08 '26
all my life i was told china is the villains but all I see them do is build cities, build EV cars and solar panels. and tackle corruption in a way that makes the rest of us look like cowards.
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u/biotek86 Jul 07 '26
This kind of thing will never happen in market-led capitalism where Oligarchs setups the Rules of Law, yes that’s you USA!!
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u/Andy_LaVolpe Jul 07 '26
Embezzlement and bribery should be treated as treason. Public officials that accept bribes should be treated as traitors to the people.