Numlock Sunday: January 13, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week I spoke to Peter Lorentzen, a University of San Francisco economist who wrote a fascinating paper with Xi Lu of the National University of Singapore about what really went down in a Chinese corruption purge. Here’s what I wrote about it in late November:

A new paper takes a data-driven look at a purported anti-corruption purge carried out by the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping. The probe took out not only low-level officials, but also several high-ranked officials considered Xi’s rivals, leading some to wonder whether it was a bona fide corruption sweep or more of a targeted attack. The paper looks at social networks to find a number of fascinating things: namely, officials in the areas with the most corruption did, in fact, get targeted at a higher r…