Research on nonmarket strategy has produced rich evidence that political connections generate rents through preferential procurement, credit access, and regulatory protection. Yet this literature focuses on legal ties operating through formalized channels, while in much of the global economy, particularly in contexts with weak rule of law, political connections frequently cross into illegality. This paper brings corruption into the political connections framework, theorizing corrupt ties as risky political connections that perform similar resource-access functions to legal ones but carry exposure risks whose activation depends on the state’s shifting enforcement priorities. The state, in this account, is not a passive institutional backdrop but an active hazard arbiter that endogenously determines when corrupt connections become liabilities. China’s anti-corruption campaign launched in late 2012, which is comprehensive in coverage yet sudden and unanticipated for local actors, provides the empirical context. Drawing on approximately 100,000 first-instance criminal corruption judgments processed through a large language model extraction pipeline yielding 380,000 individual corrupt events, combined with central inspection records, government procurement data, and firm financials, I exploit staggered Central Inspection Team deployments across provinces for causal identification. I find that enforcement reduces the frequency of corrupt transactions but sharply raises the price of those that remain, causing a scarcity premium of roughly 145 percent five years after inspection. This effect is concentrated in bribery rather than embezzlement. Enforcement also comprehensively elevates the downside risk of exposure: case processing accelerates, sentences lengthen, probation declines, and fines rise. Sanctioned firms experience a persistent 16 percent decline in government procurement revenue, while primary competitors capture 9 percent gains. Together, these findings document that anti-corruption campaigns reprice firm political connections, transforming them from strategic assets into contingent liabilities and reshaping firms’ competitive advantage for state-controlled resources.