It's not a bribe, it's a business card

[pmbug]

...
Hong Kong also seems to be a popular place for Chinese bureaucrats to store their ill-gotten wealth. In fact, one of the new trends we’ve seen and heard about from business colleagues in Asia is how mainland officials are now receiving bribes in the form of solid gold business cards.

Imagine you’re a businessman in Xian who needs some silly permit, and you have to grease a local bureaucrat. It would be untoward to deliver a suitcase full of cash… especially these days with all the internal scrutiny from the Bo Xilai incident.

So now what business people seem to be doing is minting solid gold business cards. When they want to bribe an official, they schedule a meeting, and hand them a business card or six. It’s so innocuous, nobody really notices.

For the bureaucrat, it’s much simpler to travel with a few ‘gold cards’ than cash. And Hong Kong is an easy place to store a collection of such cards… or even melt them down into other forms.
...

http://www.businessinsider.com/gold-cards-are-the-new-bribe-in-china-2012-10?0=moneygame-contributor

 

[benjamen]

I read this earlier today and it caused a big laugh at work. I work with a lot of people born in China and I guess bribery and seeing the vaule in gold is the norm over there. My coworkers thought it was funny that Americans made such a big deal about such a thing.

 

[bushi]

...again, different culture, different values... Bribery is commonplace in Poland, too - unfortunately. One of the reasons I've emigrated. One either lives by his values, or get's very bad mana over time!

I suppose it is always the case in places where officials have too much to say - the system got corrupted. And people born and risen in such system, see nothing strange or abnormal in such corruption.

Too bad for them.

 

[silvercoinrn]

Wow, thats kind of cool actually. id like to find one of those cards