Among the case materials Zhou Yi had collected and organized, quite a few cases involved or touched on official corruption.
And in those cases, Zhou Yi had noticed something very interesting.
Some officials who accepted bribes, and the people who bribed them, had faithfully recorded every transaction for years, even decades, sometimes compiling the records into ledgers.
Zhou Yi could not understand what they hoped to achieve by doing that.
Was it to provide a convenient plot device when their cases were eventually cracked?
Don't laugh. Just search online for officials' diaries, and you'll discover that plenty of people had this habit.
Take one municipal Party committee secretary-general, for example. Three diaries and two portable hard drives documented his relationships with more than two hundred women, as well as the criminal fact that he had accepted over 8.6 million yuan in bribes.
Then there was a female district chief who had accepted over six million yuan in bribes. Her nine diaries not only detailed each partner's background, the time, the place, and her impressions, but also rigorously rated them according to her own four-tier scale: extremely satisfying, very good, average, and rather poor.
For bribe-givers, the purpose of "keeping accounts" was relatively easy to understand. First, they genuinely needed records of their income and expenses. Second, those records could serve as leverage over the recipients, forcing them to provide protection when trouble came.
For the recipients, however, the purpose of "keeping accounts" was a little harder to guess.
Perhaps it was a personal hobby, or perhaps some twisted impulse drove them to preserve those memories in diaries, taking them out from time to time to savor and toy with.
There could be many reasons, but one thing was certain: these people probably shared the same mindset.
They were greedy and