By Rong Jiaojiao, China Features

    BEIJING, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- Several women stand outside Beijing's Xizhimen subway station waving simple slips of paper at passersby. "Receipts, receipts" they brazenly shout, trying to hawk fake paid invoices from hotels, restaurants or office supply companies.

    At a cost of 20 yuan (2.5 U.S. dollars), the receipts provide a good return for those crooked enough to try and bilk their employers for reimbursement of purchases they never made.

    Despite repeated official crackdowns, this Beijing street scene, operating in broad daylight, is a small sample of a widespread societal ill that is costing the country billions of yuan.

    China's economic reform may have unleashed the world's most powerful engine of economic growth, but for some people in the country it has also opened a Pandora's box of greed, graft and corruption.

    In the first six months of 2006 more than 10,000 officials were found guilty of corruption or abuse of power for personal gain. Official statistics from the Supreme People's Court show that over the past five years, 83,308 corrupt officials have been prosecuted in 99,306 cases of embezzlement and bribery.

    "Revolution is not a dinner party," wrote China's late Chairman Mao Zedong when, as a young Communist leader, he led a rebellion against social injustice in his native Hunan Province in 1927. Now, 80 years later, those corrupt, fat-cat officials, and some of China's newly rich, are making a mockery of the sentiment as they gorge themselves at the public trough. For them life has become an endless "dinner party" and one where the bill never arrives.

    One such official in Xi'an boasted at yet another elaborate banquet that he had eaten out every night for the last two years. He felt it was almost a burden, if not an addiction, as there was always a line up of supplicants whom he could never seem to refuse.

    An annual report by the National Audit Office shows that government departments lost 2.2 billion yuan (275 million U.S. dollars) due to corruption, poor taxation and bad land management in 2005. About 685 million yuan (86 million U.S. dollars) were lost to embezzlers who fabricated expenditures or concealed and absconded with revenues. Lax tax collection, a likely euphemism for turning a blind eye to taxes owed in lieu of under-the-table favors, cost the government another 830 million yuan (104 million U.S. dollars).

    Even though embezzling can cost officials their lives, many who are caught with their hands in the public cookie jar are getting off lightly. The Procuratorate Daily, a government newspaper run by the nation's top prosecution body, revealed that the number of corrupt officials given suspended sentences has risen from 52.6 percent in 2001 to 82.83 percent in 2005. Just over 19 percent of ordinary people convicted of crimes receive suspended sentences. In some cases, corrupt officials have even been exempted from criminal penalties and allowed to keep their jobs and civil service perks.

    The paper reported that 33,519 people convicted of taking advantage of their official posts were given probation between 2003 and 2005. This did not include corrupt officials sentenced to life imprisonment or given suspended death sentences, or those convicted of criminal charges but only given Party disciplinary penalties.