Looking out over the wildly applauding delegates in the cavernous Great Hall of the People yesterday, the Chinese Premier, Mr Zhu Rongji, might have wondered how many of them agreed with his furious denunciation of corruption, and how many were really wondering when they themselves would be caught.
The previous day, the 2,900 delegates arriving in Beijing for the annual session of the National People's Congress were greeted with the news that a senior parliament member was being investigated on corruption charges, and that the government was going to spare no one in its crackdown on bribe-taking and false accounting.
Outside the hall in Tiananmen Square, hundreds of plain-clothes security officials, some of whom followed foreign correspondents, were unable to prevent at least 24 members of the banned Falun Gong movement from making brief demonstrations against their harsh treatment near the portrait of Chairman Mao yesterday.
"Evil cults must be banned and attacked in accordance with the law," said Mr Zhu in his state-of-the-nation address - delivered from a flower-decked podium, about the same time as the demonstrators were taken away in two police buses.
As expected, the premier echoed the recent tough new line on Taiwan, saying that China would not "stand idly by" if Taiwan delayed unity talks. He also promised that China would achieve "rapid growth" this year, partly through massive state spending.
But the dominant theme was the anti-corruption drive, which Mr Zhu admitted had so far failed. "We still fall far short of what the central authorities require of us and what the people expect of us," he said.
"Bureaucracy, formalism, falsification and exaggeration are rampant," and China "must take more effective measures and make unremitting efforts to fight corruption and build a clean and honest government."
His tirade underlined the recent warning by Mr Wei Jianxing, the Chinese Communist Party's chief investigator, that the battle against bribe-taking, asset-stripping, false bookkeeping and arbitrary fines is a "life-or-death political struggle for the party and the nation".
Those applauding the most vigorously yesterday - and many delegates in the largely rubberstamp Congress are clearly themselves deeply disillusioned by corruption - were reflecting the fury of ordinary people that so many party officials have been found to be on the take at a time when millions are unemployed because of economic reforms.
On Saturday, a Congress official revealed that parliament itself is tainted by scandal. Mr Cheng Kejie, a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the Congress, has been put under investigation "in relation to his economic interests", i.e. bribe-taking. Mr Cheng is one of the most senior officials ever to be targeted. A member of the party's central committee, he was brought to Beijing from Guangxi by the then premier, Li Peng, in 1998. Another top official in Guangxi was recently given life imprisonment and a former city party chief sentenced to death on corruption charges.
There were rumours that the former deputy governor of Jiang xi province in southern China, who is under sentence of death for bribe-taking, will be executed during the 11-day Congress session to ram the point home.
Several other cases underline the seriousness of the anti-corruption campaign. A huge investigation is under way in the port city of Xiamen, with over 100 officials and party cadres implicated, and last week a land management official was sentenced to death for embezzling 15.5 million RMB (£1.5 million) from funds allocated to the resettlement of people by the Three Gorges dam project. In February a former vice-governor of central Jiangxi province was executed for taking bribes.