Financial Transparency Coalition

In November of this year, more than 30,000 people, most of them from China, donated about $1.4 million to one man. The donations flowed in all shapes and sizes—wrapped around fruit and thrown into his lawn, folded into paper airplanes, and one even wired in from the German government’s human rights commissioner. The man wasn’t a spiritual leader. He wasn’t ill and he wasn’t going to donate any of it to charity. In fact, he deposited nearly the entire sum into a government account—as a guarantee on his tax evasion charges. The man—not a leader or a humanitarian—is an...

The James Mintz Group recently released a fascinating interactive database, which compiles decades of data on violations and penalties under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the U.S. flagship legislation that makes bribery of foreign officials a crime. Since its inception, prosecutors have penalized over 200 companies under the FCPA in about 80 countries, amassing about $4 billion in penalties. The database, which they call Where the Bribes are Paid, allows users to see how the total penalties amassed in each country break down by sector. It is a relatively unsurprising finding that the energy sector has generated the largest...

Corruption costs China’s economy a pretty penny. A report from China’s own central bank estimates that “up to 18,000 corrupt officials and employees of state-owned enterprises” have absconded with 800 billion yuan, or $123 billion, of state money since the 1990s. In a recent speech given to celebrate China’s Communist Party’s nineteenth anniversary, President Hu Jintao specifically addressed the importance of “rampant corruption” and the impetus to create a “clean government.” And Minxin Pei, a former scholar for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, estimates that China’s government loses as much as 10% of government spending in kickbacks and corruption,...

“Art is a revolt against fate.” It was André Malraux, a French adventurer who traveled China in the 1930s, who said that. Malraux believed art is more than just a source of “aesthetic pleasure.” His most enduring concept was "le musée imaginaire" or "the museum without walls", which asserted that art could be more powerful as an experience outside the traditional confines of museums. At the moment China is headed down a crash course with its own fate. China has had massive problems with bribery, corruption, and illicit financial flows for years. In fact illicit outflows from the People’s Republic of China...