Wang Yuexi, a small-time politician on the take, never let his lack of clout stop him from making money: To impress people, he even had someone digitally add him to a photo of Chinese leaders.

The doctored picture was just one of the tactics that Wang acknowledged after he was arrested and eventually forced to repay 2.6 million Chinese yuan, or about $360,000, in illicit gains -- another in a long parade of Chinese officials ensnared in a widening national crackdown on official corruption.

Yet a very different case also is under way. Writer Lu Gengsong was tried last week for "inciting subversion of state power" after penning five essays condemning the same offense that Wang is accused of: official corruption.

So in China today, what is the greater crime -- being corrupt or uncovering those who are?

That question is at the heart of China's tortured effort to rid business and government of widespread abuses of power. Even as this one-party state improves anti-corruption laws, it punishes those who speak out independently against powerful interests.

"The party is ambivalent," said Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who studies corruption in China. "It wants to eliminate the problem, but it doesn't want to embarrass itself in the process."

The culture of corruption -- and the relentless sloganeering against it -- have become hallmarks of China's economic rise. Three decades of growth have created torrents of new wealth faster than the state could impose law on a system that relies heavily on personal connections and influence-peddling.

Chinese and foreign scholars have created a taxonomy of official misdeeds: embezzlement (tanwu), bribe-taking (shou hui), misappropriation (nuoyong), squandering (huihuo langfei), privilege-seeking (yiquan mousi), illegal earnings (feifa shouru), illegal profiteering (touji daoba), smuggling (zousi) and the violation of accounting practices (weifan caijing jilu).

When Wang, the accused official, took the stand at his trial recently, he unspooled a case study in corruption. Born in the northern province of Shanxi to a family so poor he couldn't afford socks, he rose quickly through party ranks and earned a reputation for good, clean governance.

He became mayor of Huzhou, a mining and manufacturing city, where he was exposed to a new world of opportunity: "Some entrepreneurs started to have contact with me," he said, according to a trial report in the newspaper China Youth Daily. When he went for four months of intensive political training at the Central Party School in Beijing, "many people seized the opportunity, in any way possible, to bribe me." He began to arrange jobs for friends' children. He handed out promotions. And the stakes grew.

"I saw people I shouldn't see, I took money I shouldn't take, I ate food that I shouldn't eat," said Wang, whose case was first highlighted by the news site China Digital Times. "Once there was an opening, it was uncontrollable: The more I took, the more courageous I got and the larger the amounts got. From 30,000 or 50,000 [yuan] to 100,000 or 80,000." In U.S. terms, the bribes were growing from roughly $4,000 to nearly $14,000.

Wang was arrested last year in a crackdown.

Chinese President Hu Jintao used a major party speech this month to declare that fighting corruption will be a "long-term, complicated and difficult struggle," reiterating the party's belief that corruption could "threaten its survival." The party has established a National Corruption Prevention Bureau, composed of investigators, and begun drafting a five-year plan to fight corruption.

Despite the announcements and campaigns, anti-corruption efforts have produced mixed results. Authorities investigate only 1 in every 4 corruption allegations from the public, according to a study by Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Overall, a study by Wedeman, the political scientist, found that corruption cases have leveled off since 2000 after increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, which suggests that the government has at least contained the problem.

"They have fought things to a stalemate," Wedeman said. "Over time, the institutions and the courts are getting stronger. Their ability to investigate corruption has improved."

With all of that effort expended to curb abuses, one might imagine that the state would welcome the contributions of a volunteer watchdog such as Lu Gengsong. He had worked as a freelance writer since 1993, when he lost his job as a lecturer at a police academy in his home city of Hangzhou.

As money and construction refashioned the area's lush landscape in recent years, farmers began coming to Lu with a recurring complaint: Property developers in cahoots with local officials were seizing large tracts of farmland. It echoes a national phenomenon; land seizure has emerged as a volatile issue in the Chinese countryside. Last month, 40,000 farmers took the unusual step of posting a joint letter online to declare that they are reclaiming land they believe was improperly taken.

Land seizure was only one in a long list of subjects that Lu covered, said his wife, Wang Xue'e.

"Lu Gengsong has written 226 articles, more than 1 million [Chinese] characters. They picked out about 470 characters and used those to charge him," Wang Xue'e said, adding: "What they chose was quoted out of context, lifting sentence by sentence to say he subverted state power."

Lu was arrested in September; his wife believes local officials simply tired of his criticism. The trial, which opened Jan. 22 in Hangzhou Intermediate Court and lasted three hours, was closed to the public. A verdict is not expected for another month. In the meantime, Lu is in custody and Wang wonders why her husband's effort to combat corruption landed him there.

"I thought, this is 2008, and to still use that kind of 'prison of words' to control an individual?" she said. "It's sad." TI/Chicago Tribune, 30/01/08.