Bribery
November 7th, 2005
Although I will be missing the actual trial, as I’m going to Xi’an, I wanted to help my team out as much as I could. So I bribed the judge. Bribery has a long and glorious tradition in China. It still can prove necessary from time to time in order for things to go smoothly.
Once I learned our judge was Jorn, a German student, I immediately knew what to bribe him with. Dark beer is rare in Asia, so a mini-keg of dark German beer… …the case is in the bag. I paid 215 RMB for the keg of Köstritzer. That is a fairly considerable sum, but it was too good of fit and made for a memorable start to class.
We are going to drink it when I get back from Xi’an.
2024 Update
I did return from Xi’an. I did not get to drink any of the beer. I think we even lost the case. Worse things happened to me while I was living in China. For instance years later while living in Shanghai I had to have an organ remove. If you have any true stories about living in China you can leave a comment below. It turns out most of this paragraph was revealed in the comments, but I didn’t know that when I was editing this post almost twenty years later.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Beer, MBA, Tsinghua.
Beer always works.
Jorn and the other Germans drank it without me. In hindsight it was a fairly substantial bribe for a student. We never even won the case, not sure if my teacher got wind of it. But I thought it was very appropriate for a Chinese Law class. ;-)