Chinese go ga-ga over ipaidabribe.com

India’s democratic protests are becoming a popular export. At least five countries, including China, are replicating our anti-corruption strategies and the hugely popular website www.ipaidabribe.com, which is part of the NGO Janaagraha. Uganda, Kenya, Pakistan, Bangladesh and most recently China evinced interest in the website, posting queries on how it is run and managed. Activists in China have set up a similarly named website called ‘I made a bribe’ (ibribery.com). T R Raghunandan, who coordinates the Janaagraha website, said: “From Sunday night to Monday evening, we’ve had 20,000 hits on our website from Chinese citizens. We export very little to China and we’re delighted that a bit of it is our anti-corruption campaign, based purely on democratic strategies and methods.” A few days, Radio China interviewed Raghunandan on the Janaagraha website trying to understand how it works. “They’ve taken our concept of citizen reports in which the campaign is based on their real-life experiences. China may have a different political system but it has very strong anti-corruption laws that includes life imprisonment and death sentence,” he said. In Transparency International’s 2010 survey of perceived corruption, China ranked 78 out of 178 nations and regions, while India was at 87.