In 1988, a 35-year-old named Xi Jinping arrived as Party boss of Ningde, the poorest prefecture on the Fujian coast, and noticed something his colleagues had spent years stepping around. Scattered through the outskirts were two-story villas, in a place where local officials drew about a hundred yuan a month. The owners were cadres, the men who ran the prefecture, and the houses had been raised with cement, steel and timber skimmed from supplies meant for schools, poverty relief and disaster relief. Locals had a name for it: corruption by the side of the road. For years the discipline office had let it pass, because investigating a colleague reads, instinctively, like wronging him. The official builds his house; the investigator comes for his house; the investigator is the one in the wrong. But at the January 1989 prefectural work conference, in a room full of those same colleagues, Xi reassigned the injury. The Party, he said, was the wounded one; the cadre with the villa had done the wounding; the investigators, acting for the Party, had offended no one. “Who,” in other words, “had offended whom?” Once the Party was the victim, the cadre's house stopped looking like private property under attack and started looking like stolen goods. His colleagues, who had been shielding him out of ordinary loyalty, now had cover to move against him. The houses came down or were regularized, the cadres paid their fines, and the episode could have ended there. It did not. 38 years later, in June 2026, the state news service ran the Ningde houses again as current instruction for current cadres. - @samuelszuchan