For regular government employees, their power may be limited but not so much as to deter them from occasional bribery and embezzlement, a phenomenon referred to as "ant corruption" that analysts say is becoming an increasingly common trend.
Experts warned that such "ant corruption" could harm the government's credibility as it involves the officials working directly with the public to provide basic services.
Harmless kickbacks
Li Hongzhong, a 55-year-old motorbike driver in Yingkou, Liaoning Province, gave a carton of cigarettes worth 200 yuan ($31.7) to traffic police who had impounded his vehicle for a traffic violation.
"Everybody does this because it can fasten the speed of the whole procedure and I can get a minor punishment or probably walk away without fines," Li told the Global Times.
The cigarette carton is just the tip of the iceberg. Liu Di, a regular accountant at a taxation bureau of Yiyang, Hunan Province, was reported to have embezzled 180 million yuan in 10 years.
Liu Di was only an accountant but took 5,000 yuan daily on average before being caught and being sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in September last year, according to the Legal Daily.
Cai Xiaohong, 57, an accountant at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Beijing, embezzled over 100 million yuan in 10 years by taking transfer checks for the bookstore out of her office and laundering them through her boyfriend's business, Beijing Evening News reported.
There are also many who take advantage by stealing very small amounts on a regular basis.
Chen Yidong and Qian Zuwei, chief and deputy chief of an education study office in Tiantai county, Zhejiang Province, took 250,000 yuan in kickbacks from a local printing factory in five years, making a minuscule profit of just 0.012 yuan on each examination paper.
Chen and Qian were sentenced to 10 to 12 years of imprisonment, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
"A small kickback or fee to express thanks is considered normal in my office or in the whole bureau," an office clerk surnamed Li in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, told the Global Times. "I don't think such a small amount of money will do any harm. It's not like major corruption and we are just receiving people's thanks after we do a small favor for them."
Li, who was reluctant to reveal her full name, said that an employee rejecting such small bribes would be considered odd and ostracized by co-workers.
Worrying trend
Over 140,000 government staff received disciplinary punishments last year, among whom only 4,843 officials were over the county-level of administration. A total of 8.44 billion yuan in economic losses were recovered, according to the Ministry of Supervision on January 6.
These stories are not isolated cases but are becoming more and more common in China, according to the anti-corruption blue paper released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences earlier this month.
Forms of corruption have moved from mainly being perpetrated by individuals to group crimes using more careful methods to avoid detection. Corrupt officials are also favoring long-term bribes than short-term gains, the blue paper said.
"The ant corruption is as a result of a lack of restraints and supervision over the government and government-supported bodies," Zhu Lijia, a professor of public management at the Chinese Academy of Governance, told the Global Times.
Ant corruption is bad as it will ruin the credibility of the government when those taking the bribes are the direct providers of social services and are those working closest to the public, Zhu said.
Warning from the top
President Hu Jintao called for strict discipline to be maintained within the Party on January 9, broadly seen as a stern warning against corruption amid Party committee elections at all levels, Xinhua reported.
"The Communist Party of China will tighten supervision on the whole procedure of electing and promoting officials and will improve transparency," Hu said at a plenary session of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party's anti-corruption body.
The blue paper found that more than 80 percent of people surveyed believed the government is working hard to fight corruption. Nearly 60 percent said they are "very confident" or "relatively confident" about these anti-corruption efforts.
"What we need most to eliminate ant corruption or any other form of corruption is to strengthen law enforcement," Zhu said, "we have rules and laws to discipline corruption but we need those rules to be put into practice, not put aside."
Xinhua contributed to this story