Tackling graft is good for a nation's economic future

US free market absolutist ideologists pump out more irrelevant and confusing rhetoric than a giant squid pours out ink - the wave of criticism for China's anti-corruption policies being a case in point.

Critics claim China's economic slowdown is primarily due to President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has been carried out nationwide over the past five years, and that the country needs a drastic reduction in free private sector regulation to restore the sky-high annual growth rates it enjoyed for so many years.

Nothing could be further from the truth. These critics are mistaking a positive process of economic transformation and the maturing of China's economy and society as signs of terminal structural weakness. This is similar to a doctor looking at the hormonal change and other physical changes of growing teenagers and diagnosing them as dying of terminal cancer or old age.