Not only that but China is notorious for its brutal laws. A Canadian was executed on rumors of drug trafficking. You often see people accused of financial crimes executed. China's court system has something like a 99.9% conviction rate.
The problem in China is that the expectation to get caught for any crime at all is very low. The population is huge and it's very easy to get away with tax evasion, financial frauds, etc. Since the expectation to get caught is low, they make up with very harsh sentences.
Yeah. My impression is that Chinese penalites for many crimes are out of whack and need to be tuned better so the punishment fits the crime. (Not saying that The West is perfect, but as I said above, I don't think China's legal system is quite as well-refined.)
There was actually quite a lot of discussion on HN on the slate article, with many people who live(d) in China attesting to the truth of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10173395
That doesn't really matter, the point is that an authoritarian regime has an easy solution. In Russia they may or may not limit it to fines (I'm not sure if it can be converted into criminal charges if you accumulate too many fines?). In China they may go for jail time right away and given China's past performance I don't see that as a too wild assumption.
It's simple; China has strong laws against self-dealing, and (in the poster's view) their legal code is not riddled with loopholes and getout clauses. We have the same concept in the USA, but it is rarely applies to financial crimes. It's called 'strict liability.'
And have you not noticed how people sometimes get longer prison terms for small crimes than large ones? As of 2021, the US incarcerates ~5x more people than China (per capita), but penalties for untoward business activity are generally light.
Yes, that was essentially my point. If something goes on your record you will presumably have a harder time getting jobs or renting rooms, especially if your already have low status. Presumably the reason to make these punishments "more harsh" than the damage of the crime is to enforce social behavior. In some way that seem more harsh then the Chinese version. Even if China is worse in most ways, it's sometimes more relaxed than the US when it comes to personal freedoms.
China's policy of responding only when they are caught is broad and applies to a wide variety of violations. The problem is, they also make it very hard to police China. This is deliberate.
The 1-2% that get caught and punished are acceptable breakage from the broader picture.
The point is there are different stakeholders with mutually incompatible interests in China. It’s not monolithic and no one centre of power knows and directs everything all the time. That’s why when the central authorities come across local officials doing stuff that hurts it embarrasses them, they impose such harsh penalties, including death. You don’t have to punish behaviour that doesn’t happen.
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