The plenum and the resulting decision were surprisingly light on corruption references, given how graft had dominated the domestic news agenda for months in the run-up, although it did involve the establishment of a new national security agency and reshuffled some of the disciplinary roles within the Communist Party structure.

So it was back to business as usual last week with the report in Caixin magazine that Lu Xiangdong, the former deputy general manager of the state- owned telecoms giant China Mobile, was sentenced to life in prison for taking bribes totalling more than 20 million yuan (€2.5 million).

Apparently, between January 2008 and August this year, anti-graft officials handled more than 151,000 cases of corruption and bribery, involving more than 198,000 people.

According to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, prosecutors across the country have investigated more than 22,500 corruption cases in the first eight months of 2013.

Of the officials handed disciplinary violations, just over 1,000 were at the department or bureau level, while 32 were at or above ministerial level, CCTV reported.

One of the items up for discussion at the recent plenum was an integrity bonus to be awarded to civil servants who retire with clean records. It still needs to be worked out how exactly one assesses what a clean record is.

State media has also hailed how participative corruption investigation has become. The party’s discipline inspection agency launched a new website in September which gets a daily average of 827 tip-offs about corruption.