Today China announced that agents from the government anti-graft division raided the home of a man named Ma Chaoqun. Mr. Chaoqun is the former head of a state-controlled company called Beidaihe Water Supply Corporation. This is a position that comes with an annual salary of roughly $50,000. That salary doesn’t quite match up to what agents found in the home. Here’s a highlight of what agents discovered hidden in this civil servant’s humble abode:

  1. 120 million yuan in currency = $19.6 million USD.
  2. 82 pounds of gold = $1.574 million
  3. Ownership documents connected to 68 homes and apartment units near the area of the raid. Chinese President Xi Jinping is on the hunt to fight corruption. In the first 10 months of 2014 alone, China has arrested, prosecuted and sentenced over 13,000 officials who were guilty of some form of corruption or bribery. President Xi has been targeting what he calls “flies” (lower-ranking government officials) as well as “tigers” (higher-ranking, senior officials) within the ruling political party. Because of these prosecutions, Chinese political officials are committing suicide at alarmingly high rate. Since 2013, at least 62 public officials have died from “unnatural” circumstances. Of those, 32 have been confirmed as suicides. And those are just the officially confirmed deaths. Unlike in the US where a corrupt white-collar criminal gets probation, or maybe spends a year at a country-club prison, China literally executes its worst offenders. Just a few weeks ago, on October 17, a Chinese rail official was found guilty of taking $7.7 million worth of bribes from companies looking to secure construction contracts, over an 11-year period. Not only was the rail official sentenced to death, all of his immediate family’s property was forfeited to the state.