Recently, when I saw this case, I suddenly thought of the ancient law of “punishing to the extent of involving nine clans”—even though it was brutal, it genuinely addressed a problem that modern law couldn’t solve.

Take Xu Huping, the 82-year-old “Old Director,” for example. Back when he was in office, 1,259 cultural relics mysteriously went missing; many national treasures were suspected of being swapped out. Then, in turn, his son opened an auction house, and the two of them cooperated seamlessly—almost like the biggest parasites in the 21st-century cultural relics world. But what about now? The law can hardly do anything to him—by the time he’s about to be laid in the ground, no matter how long the sentence is, he won’t be able to stay behind bars for more than a few days.

That’s the problem. When someone commits embezzlement and corruption, at most they themselves end up in prison; their descendants can still take the civil service exams as usual and still enjoy the benefits that come with the system—there’s effectively no cost. If this were in ancient times, such a scourge would have had their household searched and annihilated, and a “punishing to the extent of involving nine clans” approach, while terrifying on the surface, would at least cut off the motivation for corruption at its root. Your greed might destroy the entire family’s future.

Many people today say we should investigate “three generations,” permanently barring corrupt officials’ children from taking civil service positions and from entering the system. I think this idea is reasonable. It’s not about restoring the extreme punishments of ancient times, but it is indeed about increasing the cost of wrongdoing. The current situation is: today you bring down one corrupt official, and tomorrow another bunch shows up—because the cost is too low and the rewards are too high. As long as relatives can keep eating from the system, greed will always find a market.

That’s the fundamental reason why corruption keeps recurring and is hard to eradicate.