For anybody who believes the crackdown on Chinese corruption by President Xi Jinping was just for show, the numbers of those who have been disciplined or arrested so far are breathtaking. According to figures compiled by the Hong Kong-based Reorient Securities Ltd, they include 24 provincial officials, 23 vice-provincial ones, 204 prefecture officials,3,003 county bureaucrats and 40,579 local government ones. In China’s command economy, the ability of officials to hand out approvals is a ticket to corruption. Virtually every license, approval, endorsement, authorization or sanction carries the opportunity to demand payment on the side. The result has been a staggering amount of money that has flowed out to gambling houses in Macau or to as far away as the British Virgin Islands, much of it round-tripped back into China as supposedly legal investment. According to a report released by the NGO Global Financial Integrity in December 2012 and entitled