r/interesting • u/Forevertrez • Apr 19 '26
Additional Context Pinned The mayor of Haikou, China, who reportedly accumulated about $4.5 billion during his career and was found with 13.5 tons of gold and 23 tons of cash in his apartments, has been sentenced to death.
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u/TwoNowFive Apr 19 '26
Real life Smaug over there. You would think after the first billion that would be enough
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u/Rise-O-Matic Apr 19 '26
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u/adanishplz Apr 19 '26
I, too, have an addiction to cash, gold, and valuable gemstones.
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u/vblink_ Apr 19 '26
I don't, I would like to be comfortably wealthy then enjoy life. I don't need to get the high score.
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u/J0J0388 Apr 19 '26
For real, enough money to not have to worry about money is cool.
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u/TheKnight_King Apr 20 '26
I’ll take enough money to not worry about where I’m going to live and how I’ll be able to afford to eat when I’m a senior citizen.
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u/Houndfell Apr 19 '26
I think that's the difference. Normal people don't make it to Smaug status because they cash out and actually enjoy life. You don't really hear about them. The billionaires are the people who have a compulsion to amass wealth. It will never, ever be enough. 500M wasn't enough. 900M wasn't enough. 5B wasn't enough. They don't quit, they don't retire, they just keep hoarding.
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u/Tiny-Doughnut Apr 20 '26
There's a growing body of research from behavioral neuroscience which indicate that wealth, power, and privilege have a deleterious effect on the brain. People with high-socioeconomic status often:
- Have reduced empathy and compassion.
- Have a diminished ability to see from someone else's perspective.
- Have low impulse control.
- Have an extreme sense of entitlement.
- Have a hoarding disorder.
- Have a dangerously high tolerance for risk.
When you don't need to cooperate with other people to survive, they become irrelevant to you. When you're in charge, you can behave very badly and people will still be polite and respectful toward you. Instead of reciprocity, it's a formalized double standard. When you have status, you're given excessive credibility, and rarely hear the very ordinary push-back from others most of us are accustomed to, instead you receive flattery and praise and your ideas are taken seriously by default.
Humans have a strong need for egalitarianism; without it our brains malfunction and turn us into the worst versions of ourselves.
Some sources:
Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years
Does power corrupt? An fMRI study on the effect of power and social value orientation on inequity aversion.
Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence From Visual Attention
The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege: High Socioeconomic Status Individuals From Affluent Backgrounds Are Uniquely High in Entitlement
Hoarding Disorder: It's More Than Just an Obsession - Implications for Financial Therapists and Planners
On the evolution of hoarding, risk-taking, and wealth distribution in nonhuman and human populations
Yes. This is copypasta that I've been refining over the past year or two. Please feel free to share it. Feel free to add to it. You don't have to credit me.
I'm always interested in hearing about any additional studies that would be worth adding, too!
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u/Leaf_Locke Apr 20 '26
Yo wtf happened to Dr. Horrible? Homie got real messed up after killing the woman he loved :(
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u/HypotenuseOfTentacle Apr 19 '26
I forget who said it, but poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor but because we cannot satisfy the rich
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u/Mild_Karate_Chop Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
There is an Arabic proverb
There is enough in this world for everyone's need , but not enough for one man's greed.
Edit : for instead of to fill, was corrected by a native speaker . Thanks
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u/tucson_catboy Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
I grew up with a kids book of Arabic proverbs and some of them are so good.
My favorites where:
"Trust in God but tie your camel."
"The son of a duck is a
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u/Mild_Karate_Chop Apr 19 '26
I think the first one is an advice from one of their early Caliphs .
Like Cromwell saying Trust in God but keep your powder dry .
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u/Galaedrid Apr 20 '26
"The son of a duck is a
quackerfloater"I'm trying, but I really can't figure this one out... whats the deeper meaning?
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u/tucson_catboy Apr 20 '26
As it was explained to me. It's a combination of English's "the apple doesnt fall far from the tree" and the "leopard cant change it's spots."
As hard as you may want to try to get away from your parents it will always be what you were raised to think as normal, and their influence will never leave. You can choose only to fly but you'll still always know how to float and quack.
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u/GrinchWhoStoleEaster Apr 19 '26
Huh...proverbs are the kind of phraseology that doesn't always translate well, like poetry, but this is really elegant in English!
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u/maggiemayfish Apr 19 '26
My father, god rest his soul, would always say to us "kids, always remember to stop after the first billion, or the government will have you executed".
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u/pecky5 Apr 19 '26
Here's a sobering fact, Smaug is the 2nd richest fictional character, estimated net worth is $64 billion, Scrooge McDuck is the estimated richest character at around $100 billion.
There are real people in earth that have more money than fictional character's whose sole defining characteristic is how unfathomably wealthy they are.
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u/Octopie13 Apr 19 '26
This might be the weed talking, but that’s melting my brain. We haven’t even made up a character approaching realty
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u/SteelCode Apr 20 '26
Scrooge McDuck was imagined almost a century ago (~1947)... it's only been roughly ~20 years that a real person surpassed that fictional wealth... all because digital wealth has allowed substantial market manipulation (through numerous methods) where it would be far more difficult to store and transport the Scrooge-ian level of physical currency... hence the giant vault with a dollar sign facade.
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u/c3p-bro Apr 20 '26
That’s BS. All the earths mined gold takes is valued at 29T and would fill up a 75x75 cube. Smaugs cavern is significantly larger than that, hundreds of feet long and the gold is stacked quite deep as well.
Smaugs probably worth 150T easy.
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u/MrSchulindersGuitar Apr 19 '26
Well that doesn't sound right. I just finished ready player two and I'm pretty sure even in book one they talk about how the owner of the Oasis easily smashed that number. And that's just from the very last book I read. I'm sure we could find many more that surpass both those characters.
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u/hanks_panky_emporium Apr 20 '26
Slight difference in these IP's is Ready Player One and Two is all hand waved with nonsensical numbers. Smaug had to do a set of tasks and decimate the dwarven stronghold to horde his wealth, that's something he had to do.
Scrooge leveraged shady real estate and slumlord schemes to amass his wealth.
The owner of the Oasis is as wealthy as they are because the author flicked his wrist and made it so. The way he accumulated his wealth and actually succeeded doesn't make sense within the world he wrote, especially with megacorps willing to firebomb people if someone might threaten a tiny bit of their bottom line.
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u/RhysA Apr 20 '26
No, its just those lists are 1. Ancient and 2. Pretty limited in the franchises they consider.
There are books series with millions of sales where people effectively own multiple solar systems that go into the details of exactly how they amassed that kind of wealth.
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u/Huge_Leader_6605 Apr 19 '26
I mean it's corruption. I would imagine you can't really stop even if you wanted to. There's people that know you did corrupt stuff, and they want to keep doing corrupt stuff. If you're gonna refuse they will probably not be like yeah ok cool dude.
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u/AbominableGoMan Apr 19 '26
Me, weeping, as someone forces me to take bars of gold to approve a development that was already approved and I had no jurisdiction over anyways:
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u/GrammarGhandi23 Apr 19 '26
Every billionaire is a dragon.
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u/Imaginary-Not-Friend Apr 19 '26
When is the first billion ever enough for most billionaires?
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u/schwanzweissfoto Apr 19 '26
At that point it's like an addiction. They won't stop voluntarily.
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u/Trexus1 Apr 20 '26
It's like a gambling addict that can't stop winning. These people are making more than I make in a year every hour on the hour.
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u/domestic-jones Apr 19 '26
Props to the apartment builders that made a floor that could hold 13+ tons of gold.
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u/Pretend_Weight5385 Apr 19 '26
I just noticed that the title is apartments , a real life Escobar situation there.
Maybe he started his morning meetings with... 銀或鉛
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u/VerdugoCortex Apr 19 '26
Schrodinger's Chinese building. Always built to the worse standards and ready to collapse but also able to hold multiple tons of extra metal in one room.
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u/qtx Apr 20 '26
Difference between the US and China.
When an apartment building collapses in China the developers and builders will get prosecuted and put in jail and in some cases be executed.
When an apartment building collapses in the US the developers and builders will get off scot-free (Surfside condominium collapse, Hyatt Regency walkway collapse).
Which of the two has a better incentive to make sturdy buildings?
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u/Sk1rm1sh Apr 20 '26
I get the feeling a guy with 13.5 tons of gold and 23 tons of cash can afford to incentivise people to build or sell him a structurally safe property.
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u/El_Rat0ncit0 Apr 20 '26
Not that I am a fan of authoritarian governments, but at least these criminals don't get pardoned by their leaders.
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u/spen8tor Apr 19 '26
It's just the commoners whose things are built in the poorest way possible, the rich elite have actual nice things/buildings built to a high quality standard (usually built by established foreign companies though)
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u/MemphisRitz Apr 20 '26
Wait did you watch narcos or something and not realize it’s based on true events and that Pablo Escobar was actually real?
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u/dqql Apr 19 '26
Ground floor apartments
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u/reichrunner Apr 19 '26
Would still have to worry about cracking the foundations with that kind of weight lol
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u/imunfair Apr 19 '26
He was just making sure the buildings didn't topple over in the wind.
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u/GostBoster Apr 19 '26
I remember one day being told to size an UPS for an office and I got hilarious estimates because we were moving in with less than 1/3 occupation but had to size it for 100% for future proofing and was trying to get ourselves a good excuse to not buy the big boxes that were quoted.
I got size and weight and started asking around for objections. No objections until I found the civil engineer.
"Sir, I intend to put a device weighing one metric ton in this specific square meter here and its placement is non-negotiable. This is also a professional inquiry and not just personal curiosity. Do you have any objections?"
"Why yes I do have several objections."
"Can you write a detailed report and send us a separate bill for it?"
"Without hesitation, sir."
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u/delliejonut Apr 20 '26
I don't understand what you're saying. Is UPS a power supply? And what's the significance of having the engineer bill separately?
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u/TravelingMonk Apr 20 '26
I also had to read that 5 time and still dont follow.
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u/os_2342 Apr 20 '26
OP needed to install a UPS (uninterupable power supply), basically a big battery to make sure that important computers dont power off if there is a blackout.
They can be really expensive so OP didnt want to spent the amount quoted because they would not need one that big for some time so he was looking for an excuse to not accept the quotes.
Because of how heavy they are, he was able to get a civil engineer to object to the installation of the quoted UPS.
Was that of any help?
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u/TastiSqueeze Apr 20 '26
UPS is a power supply and some of them can be huge. Structural engineers determine weight capacity of floors to determine how much they can hold without collapsing. They are usually rated in pounds per square foot (or kilograms per square meter). Most structural engineers would go ballistic if someone wanted to put a metric ton of equipment in an area as small as a square meter. The separate bill is just to emphasize that they will turn it over to management so they can decide what to do and how to pay the bill. Just a way to add insult to injury for management.
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u/Swords_and_Words Apr 20 '26
Yes UPS is big power supply, a metric assload (tonne) of copper in a very small footprint. Can fall through unreinforced floors.
-Yes men murmur approval
-op makes sure the engineer knows the specs, and clarifies the nature of the question; an opinion doesn't count as your due diligence and doesn't relieve you of liability, gotta make sure it's a professional opinion. Also, the engineer may have been pressured by others to stfu about any concerns, so this also makes it easier for them to speak freely.
-op wants a separately billed report because they want it to be as honest as possible about any problems so 1. The CE is getting paid for contract work during salaried work and 2. As a separately billed transaction, the engineer is solely liable for their professional opinion and cannot as easily hide behind company lawyers.
Basically: Hey nerd, what do you REALLY think about this? Show your work and bill me for any hours you spend on it. Don't worry about your boss, I've said the magic words to remind him that he should too scared of liability to even think of hindering an engineer
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u/idontcareyo_ Apr 19 '26
you realize 23 tons of cash weighs more than 13 of gold right?
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u/domestic-jones Apr 20 '26
Wait til this guy hears about density and displacement.
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u/ghostwilliz Apr 20 '26
But... Gold is heavier...
/s if not a abundantly obviously
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u/brwnwzrd Apr 19 '26
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u/Ana990 Apr 19 '26
AHHHH ITS NOT A LIQUID
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u/tgoodri Apr 19 '26
ITS A GREAT MANY SOLID OBJECTS FORMING A HARD FLOOR-LIKE SURFACE
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u/storryeater Apr 19 '26
Scrooge's ability to swim through money is canonically and explicitly a superpower he gained though prolonged exposure, at least in the Don Rosa continuity.
I am not kidding.
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u/Ask_bout_PaterNoster Apr 20 '26
Really, walking around with no pants on gave him superpowers?
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u/storryeater Apr 20 '26
No, prolonged exposure to gold I meant.
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u/TactualTransAm Apr 20 '26
And here I was ready to throw all my pants away
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u/Ksorkrax Apr 19 '26
Kinda even happens in the Don Rosa stories when he tries do dive from a train cart full of money into one full of coal. His diving power seems not to work with coal.
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u/Pfraire Apr 19 '26
I thought those were pennies when I was a kid. Saw my parents penny jars and thought we were rich. We, in fact, were not rich.
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u/MageVicky Apr 19 '26
so disappointed to find out as an adult that you can’t actually swim in gold like this 😂
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u/Atmacrush Apr 20 '26
Damn gif doesn't have the gif of Peter Griffin diving into gold and getting injured.
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u/dynamic_gecko Apr 19 '26
Haiku bot is sleeping on the job
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u/skidstud Apr 19 '26
Some subs have it banned
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u/dynamic_gecko Apr 19 '26
Haiku bot is great
I don't know why they'd ban him
A dissappointment
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u/dad_jokesNbutt_stuff Apr 19 '26
I see what you did
Covered in sarcasm
The hilarity
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u/cheesy_hobbit Apr 19 '26
Second line is only 6 syllables
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u/TheStretchedSock Apr 20 '26
Death sentence
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u/bigboybeeperbelly Apr 20 '26
Straight to jail, believe
It or not, eight syllables:
Also jail. Right away.
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u/CHERNO-B1LL Apr 19 '26
Thank you!
What ever happened to Haiku Bot?
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u/Inkjet_Printerman Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I don't like the Haiku bot
Haiku isn't structured around what translates to 5-7-5 in English syllables poetry, though it's become so common place it may as well be a new form. The Americanized definition of Haiku started being taught in the mid-twentieth century as a result of English literature books being written with incomplete knowledge of Japanese poetry.
"A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition."
https://www.hsa-haiku.org/hsa-definitions.html
Haiku Society of America Haiku Awards 2025:
First Place
dandelion chain
I weave myself
into the meadow
Joshua St. Claire, New Freedom, PA
~ Second Place ~
breath prayer
moss breaking stone
into soil
Dan Schwerin, Sun Prairie, WI
~ Third Place ~
it's not a bug
it's a feature
first firefly
Matthew Markworth, Miamisburg, OH
~ Honorable Mention ~
skinny dipping
a single ripple
reaches Polaris
Edward Cody Huddleston, Baxley, GA
~ Honorable Mention ~
her hand curled
around his around her --
summer dusk
P M F Johnson, Minneapolis MN
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u/ctesibius Apr 19 '26
Are there any rules or conventions? For instance is three lines normal or required?
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u/polytique Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
It’s true that syllables are not equivalent to morae but the 5-7-5 still holds. It’s just a different way to count sound units.
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u/globalcoal Apr 19 '26
Funny that a news thread about a corruption case turned into a Haiku discussion thread.
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u/xniks Apr 19 '26
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u/IKIR115 Apr 19 '26
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u/the_jivest_turkey Apr 19 '26
I met this guy waiting tables in like 2012, and he is almost as much of a cheeseball in real life as in his role here. Much funnier, and incredibly nice/gracious, but cheeseball nonetheless.
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u/Drizzdub Apr 19 '26
What is 23 tons of cash
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u/BT-7274-T2 Apr 19 '26
i guess, it was to much to count, so they weight in the money
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u/Hallow_Chef Apr 19 '26
Idk but a single dollar bill weighs 1 gram, so if it was American money it’d range from 23 million to 2.3 billion.
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u/Drizzdub Apr 19 '26
Thats a very large range
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u/Hallow_Chef Apr 19 '26
I doubt it’d be 23million, thats all ones, unless he was laundering it through strip clubs exclusively or something. Considering his authority level I doubt he’d care about smaller bills to say incognito so its likely in or near the billions mark
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u/kazza789 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
I can't find good data on Renminbi, but in the US a bill weighs about 1g. Assuming it's the same in Renminbi (the notes are about the same size and thickness), and let's say they were using a ¥100 note (quivalent to about US$50).
That means 1kg is equal to about ¥100,000. A ton is equal to roughly ¥100,000,000 and 23 tons is ¥2,300,000,000. That's a little over 1 billion USD equivalent in cash.
What's crazy is that this could represent a significant portion of the total cash in circulation. China looks to have about 14T in physical cash supply, so this one guy had 0.02% of the entire country's physical cash supply in his apartments. That's a small %, but it's INSANE for one person to have that much physical currency.
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u/EnvironmentalRuin457 Apr 19 '26
How did the floor not collapse?
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u/0rtsaZ Apr 19 '26
i'm wondering how did these shelves not collapse?
*y'know what nvm. i think everything there is smaller than it looks, based on the size of the guy in frame
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u/LounBiker Apr 19 '26
Dead men can't tell stories of who helped them get 4.5B
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u/Financial-Coconut-32 Apr 19 '26
China jailed many high powered executives (and even sentenced two to death) during their tainted baby formula incident.
China doesn’t play around with their death sentences, and no one is immune, apparently
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u/Xendarq Apr 19 '26
True, but also let's make sure to continue funding critical government agencies like the FDA to ensure there's proper oversight.
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u/Inside_Pomelo_2957 Apr 19 '26
You understand this just ends with Trump calling everyone he doesn't like corrupt and then killing them with the government, right?
You understand that's what's happening in the video above, right? That's not someone being punished for corruption, that's someone who's been allowed to be corrupt for quite some time who stepped out of line.
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u/Kepler___ Apr 19 '26
Yeah a lot of people haven't really deeply considered the sheer gravity of giving the state legal authority to kill citizens. It appeals to our reactionary nature, but it is so easy for authorities to make these subtle additions to allow abuse. Sex offenders getting the death penalty is a common one, but it's so trivial for the state to then expand that definition as Florida has shown recently.
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u/Acrobatic_Dish6963 Apr 19 '26
They are immune until they piss the wrong person off or they have something the state wants - in this case, 13.5 tons of gold.
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u/allitalli Apr 19 '26
true. there was one tennis player who very publicly had to walk back a rape allegation because the guy in question was a connected gov official.
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u/whubbard Apr 19 '26
Peng Shuai. She was disappeared, forced to retire, and hasn't left China since. Pretty awful.
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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka Apr 19 '26
China protects their own. Dumbasses here don't understand its a big club over there too, and much further along than USA is.
They'd be executing any opposition if it still existed.
And they know they need to make examples of people to keep the masses from revolting.
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u/EvileyeofBlueRose Apr 20 '26
Summery of Chinese history.
Thousands of years of imperial culture.
80% spent on keeping the masses from revolting.
The rest is the aftermath of failing to do so.
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u/Anceradi Apr 20 '26
She never accused him of rape though, I'm not sure where this comes from. She basically accused him of toying with her feelings, that he was not leaving his wife for her, etc. Her account painted the guy in a bad light, but there was nothing even close to rape mentioned in her posts at any point.
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u/Logical-Claim286 Apr 19 '26
Eh, it depends. The ringleaders were given blanket exemptions from all prosecution because they are high ranking party members. The junior partners were sentenced to death, and one everyone believes switched with a body double who "volunteered" for the position in exchange for his family debts being erased.
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u/Blajamon Apr 20 '26
I haven’t heard this version of events, do you have a credible source for that?
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u/rebelrexx Apr 19 '26
Same shit happens in US too.
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u/Thehealthygamer Apr 19 '26
Except in the U.S. billionaires would never even get charged, much less the death penalty.
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u/AskMantis23 Apr 19 '26
In the US one member of a corrupt ring of illegal activity by billionaires wouldn't be charged and then killed to protect the remaining members of that group?
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u/Jamooser Apr 19 '26
This comment is entirely ignorant of the nature of Chinese politics. The CCP isn't an iron fist on every street corner, and mayors of major cities have a lot of political pull. China is a "mayor economy," and a huge priority of Beijing is to constantly be striking a balance between all the individual polities in a country of over a billion people.
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u/retrospct Apr 19 '26
How do you even accumulate/grift that much money without anyone noticing?
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Apr 19 '26
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u/Federal-Guess7420 Apr 19 '26
Absolutely this guy used to be on Xi's good boy list and was moved to his naughty list. This is why authoritarianism is so dangerous the corruption was there all along and if they would have just kept their boss happy it would have lasted forever.
This guy is not going to be replaced by some saint that will give all his salary to the poor. Its going to be another sociopath bootlicker.
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u/Robot9004 Apr 19 '26
This guy was mayor of a city of 3 million people, Xi has probably never even heard of this guy.
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u/MrDrone Apr 19 '26
To set some context this is the 47th largest city by population in China at shy of 3 million. The 47th largest city in America is Bakersfield, CA at 400k.
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u/SweatyAdhesive Apr 19 '26
people don't understand how big and dense china has become
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u/liovantirealm7177 Apr 19 '26
It being a provincial capital, I would expect Xi to know of him
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u/EchoingAngel Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
Maybe the video was biased, but Xi seemed to be very hardline against corruption in a documentary I saw on his life thus far
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u/eranam Apr 20 '26
Basically, there is so much corruption at the highest echelons in China that you can easily crack down on corruption in a significant way while sparing a large number of corrupt people.
It’s a classic strat’ called rule by law as opposed to rule of law, where the idea is that you enforce law selectively, when and against whom it benefits you.
That said, there is probably corruption overall under Xi than under Hu, and certainly Jiang. But if you’re one of Xi’s buds and corrupt, you’re pretty safe unless you fuck up majorly or get on his wrong side.
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u/Velifax Apr 19 '26
Honestly this just seems like mental illness.
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u/JayBird1138 Apr 19 '26
Yes, there must be some reason he kept so much as gold rather than convert, move it overseas, and invest.
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u/SeaHam Apr 19 '26
Because it is.
No normal person has 100 million dollars and decides they need another 100 million.
Start treating billionaires as mentally ill.
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u/Common-Marzipan4262 Apr 19 '26
This happened 7 years ago. He wasn’t killed, but expelled from the party and lost all political rights. He was determined to secretly be the wealthiest person in China from all the bribes he accepted. So it makes sense, since enormous hidden wealth is a threat to the party.
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u/Squoghunter1492 Apr 20 '26
Yeah, the title is conflating two different people, Luo Zengbin the party chief of Haikou who has been sentenced to death for accepting $46.2mil USD in bribes, and Zhang Qi the former party committee secretary of Hainan who had accumulated $46bil USD in bribes. This video is from the Zhang Qi case, and as far as I can tell the cash was just in bank accounts, not stored in apartments.
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u/TheSciFiGuy80 Apr 19 '26
What exactly was the end game plan here? I'd have absconded with a quarter of that before anyone got wise and I got caught…
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u/SuperSimpleSam Apr 19 '26
Senator Bob Menendez got 11 years for bribery, they found him with $100k in gold bars in his house.
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u/citizensyn Apr 19 '26
That's not enough to avoid prosecution bro gotta be in the 50m+ range
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u/PorygonTriAttack Apr 19 '26
I'm not saying he's innocent, but in all likelihood, he was the fall guy. When they confiscate this, it will miraculously go to the government... so where did this gold come from?
It is rather convenient that this mayor dies...
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u/HiBob-HiBob Apr 19 '26
He was a mayor. Fall guy or not. He was definitely complicit
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u/I_am_le_tired Apr 19 '26
A fall guy usually doesn't fall with multiple billions. BILLIONS.
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u/ven-solaire Apr 19 '26
Mayor steals billions from the government, sentenced to death for corruption, genius redditor: surely the government was in on this…
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Apr 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SoulOfTheDragon Apr 19 '26
13,5 tons doesn't take much space with such an heavy metal. As in corner of a room at worst. If your floor can handle it.
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u/g0ld-f1sh Apr 20 '26
This is 7 year old news, Zhang Qi never had a death sentence he was sentenced to life in prison. Not only is it misinformation but it's also nearly a decade old misinformation.
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u/IKIR115 Apr 20 '26
Here’s what I could find about this story: