A fortnight ago President Hu Jintao called his Politburo together to discuss maintaining the Communist Party's "superior morality" and "establishing a clean government by eliminating corruption", according to Xinhua.

Meanwhile, at Sauna City, a short walk from "Benghai" County government headquarters, the top cadres are dividing up the taxpayer spoils over hot pot, gambling, saunas and prostitutes, usually in that order. It's not just carnal pleasures that are up for sale, but investment projects, procurement contracts and almost every key position in the bureaucracy.

Benghai is the made-up name for a real and thriving county in Anhui province. A year ago I toured Benghai with Graeme Smith, a scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney. Since then, Beijing's regular corruption crackdowns have appeared to me to be little more than pantomime, designed to reassure the public and defeat the odd political adversary.

Smith has spent four years getting to know everyone he can in Benghai and working out exactly how the money flows. He has now mapped the internal logic of Chinese corruption in Political Machinations in a Rural County, in The China Journal.

The perpetrators of corruption are rarely morally good or bad. Rather, they are playing by the unwritten rules of a system that makes them utterly dependent on the patronage of those higher up the tree - and oblivious to the needs of those below.