But, at times, some of these scandals seem to be driven by the ambition for superlatives that has given China the world's largest shopping malls and bridges and the like.
Driven by the ambition to fulfil the right of each prisoner to access religious services, but strongly influenced at the same time by a previous negative experience with a radicalised imam in another prison, she contacted the Council of Integration of the City of Wiesbaden in order to find an imam for the prison.
Driven by the unrealistic ambition of "quick results" to win Afghani hearts and minds, donors have channeled massive amounts of aid that is well beyond the capacity of the local institutions to absorb.
But the dean, Cecilia Chang, fought her way up driven by the same ambition and greed that would pull her down, accused of stealing more than $1 million from the school and using foreign scholarship students as her personal servants, prosecutors said during a three-week trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.
All in all, then, Redknapp's may have been the career of a hard-working and talented manager, but it wasn't one driven by the vaulting ambition of a Fergie, Wenger or Mourinho, the alpha males of football for whom anything less than 110%, heart-on-sleeve commitment to being the best is an intolerable admission of weakness.
It is typical of China's many fast-emerging cities, driven by the big ambitions of local governments.
Though he was driven by ambition, his ambition was to serve the cause of the poor and the peasants, and, if he turned toward Maximilien de Robespierre, the most pitiless of the revolutionaries, it was from conviction.
In retrospect, though progress seemed agonisingly protracted and uncertain, Crick and Watson's breakthrough occurred at warp speed, driven by "the American's" obsessive ambition.
This was, I argued, essential to the story of characters driven by the uglier aspects of ambition and greed".
They have tremendous will and determination -- whether one thinks it's self-serving or not -- and they are all driven by the master that is ambition.
The ambition is driven by the country's immense reserves of fossil fuels.
