Fighting corruption in China – the video game

January 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Fighting corruption in China – the video game

January 8, 2014

Liz Carter

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“Fight Corruption” online game in China. Photo: Supplied

Washington: Official corruption in China is a serious matter: In January 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping openly vowed to tackle it, and a 2013 Pew study found that 53 percent of Chinese consider it a “very big problem.” But fighting bribery, extortion and graft isn’t just a presidential directive in China; it’s now also online entertainment.On January 6, the Communist Party-run newspaper People’s Daily introduced an online video game called “Fight Corruption” on Weibo, China’s Twitter. Much like whack-a-mole, players gain points for using an electric prod to strike corrupt officials as they appear and disappear in the windows of a prison. “Click on your mouse to activate the electric prod,” the People’s Daily urges, “and get yourself on the anti-corruption high-score list.”

The game contains four types of corrupt bureaucrats: one, with hearts for eyes and a salivating mouth, is no doubt a nod to dirty officials’ predilection for keeping mistresses. A second type flaunts cash, likely embezzled; a third type looks ready to pass along a bag of money; a fourth holds a red stamp, the kind used to approve contracts, which may indicate abuse of power. Players receive 100 points for every official successfully tased, and lose 100 for shocking police officers, who also appear in the prison windows to entice the trigger-happy.

The People’s Daily encourages web users to play the game by claiming that “everyone has a responsibility to fight corruption and embezzlement.” But one anonymous Weibo user argued that there were better ways to increase public participation. “If China passed a law that entitled whomever reported a corrupt official to 10 percent of that official’s embezzled assets,” he wrote, “then everyone would get involved.”

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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