While communist China seems now to officially embrace the tenets of free trade and consumerism, at first a seemingly gross contradiction in terms, it's main problem remains shaking off entrenched corruption. Both the West and East are shackled by corruption, which the US Enron investigation will highlight for sure, but loosening party cadre power is an even bigger challenge for China than Enron and the like are for the US...

Reform has been the keyword for China these last few years, for the entrenched privelages of being a party cadre will take as long to stamp out as they took to build up. For competition is the nub of the free market, and circumventing this by business-political connections, in either the West or East, weakens it.

China is also a big country, and while high profile cases have dominated the press in the more prosperous South and East, old ways will persevere for much longer in the impoverished West - already beset by the closing of inefficient state owned entreprises.

China's banks are in the spotlight, and this week the Bank of China investigation is getting front page treatment internationally.

The Far East Economic Review examines the implications in next week's issue:

China's Bankers: Rotten to the Top

Excerpt: A U.S. investigati0n into corruption at the Bank of China has toppled one of the country's leading bankers and exposed the extent to which politics sabotages professionalism in its banking system. Only sweeping reforms can hope to stop the growth of bank graft