Is corruption an inevitable part of the transition to a free-market economy? Yan Sun here examines the ways in which market reforms in the People's Republic of China have shaped corruption since 1978 and how corruption has in turn shaped those reforms. She suggests that recent corruption is largely a byproduct of post-Mao reforms, spurred by the economic incentives and structural opportunities in the emerging marketplace. Sun finds that the steady retreat of the state has both increased mechanisms for cadre misconduct and reduced disincentives against it. Chinese disciplinary offices, law enforcement agencies, and legal professionals compile and publish annual casebooks of economic crimes. The cases, processed in the Chinese penal system, represent offenders from party-state agencies at central and local levels as well as state firms of varying sizes and types of ownership. Sun uses these casebooks to illuminate the extent and forms of corruption in the People's Republic of China. Unintended and informal mechanisms arising from corruption may, she finds, take on a life of their own and undermine the central state's ability to implement its developmental policies, discipline its staff, enforce its regulatory infrastructure, and fundamentally transform the economy.

This text examines all facets of corruption: meaning, incidence, monetary value, the kinds of goods exchanged, the perpetrators and their strategies, in China since 1949. It explores the irony of how ideology and organizational structures under socialism can both restrain and encourage corruption.

Why has China grown so fast for so long despite vast corruption? In China's Gilded Age, Yuen Yuen Ang maintains that all corruption is harmful, but not all types of corruption hurt growth. Ang unbundles corruption into four varieties: petty theft, grand theft, speed money, and access money. While the first three types impede growth, access money - elite exchanges of power and profit - cuts both ways: it stimulates investment and growth but produces serious risks for the economy and political system. Since market opening, corruption in China has evolved toward access money. Using a range of data sources, the author explains the evolution of Chinese corruption, how it differs from the West and other developing countries, and how Xi's anti-corruption campaign could affect growth and governance. In this formidable yet accessible book, Ang challenges one-dimensional measures of corruption. By unbundling the problem and adopting a comparative-historical lens, she reveals that the rise of capitalism was not accompanied by the eradication of corruption, but rather by its evolution from thuggery and theft to access money. In doing so, she changes the way we think about corruption and capitalism, not only in China but around the world.

This collection examines corruption and abuses of power in China from the end of the imperial period to the present. The interdisciplinary group of contributors examines how the Chinese Communist Party has adapted to economic and social changes while continuing to control the law, state, and mass media.

This book contrasts experiences of mainland China and Hong Kong to explore the pressing question of how governments can transform a culture of widespread corruption to one of clean government. Melanie Manion examines Hong Kong as the best example of the possibility of reform. Within a few years it achieved a spectacularly successful conversion to clean government. Mainland China illustrates the difficulty of reform. Despite more than two decades of anticorruption reform, corruption in China continues to spread essentially unabated. The book argues that where corruption is already commonplace, the context in which officials and ordinary citizens make choices to transact corruptly (or not) is crucially different from that in which corrupt practices are uncommon. A central feature of this difference is the role of beliefs about the prevalence of corruption and the reliability of government as an enforcer of rules ostensibly constraining official venality. Anticorruption reform in a setting of widespread corruption is a problem not only of reducing corrupt payoffs, but also of changing broadly shared expectations of venality. The book explores differences in institutional design choices about anticorruption agencies, appropriate incentive structures, and underlying constitutional designs that contribute to the disparate outcomes in Hong Kong and mainland China.

The short essays in this volume, contributed by leading experts on Chinese economic policy, provide crisp and insightful analyses of the Chinese state's approach toward markets, the role of key actors and institutions, the evolving nature of industrial policy and the effectiveness of China’s international commitments to constrain such practices, and a preview of the likely contents and significance of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan.

This overview of Chinese politics, economy, and society by a leading scholar offers a deeply informed assessment of China’s last decade—its debates and political infighting, its rising and assertive international profile, and the forceful initiatives taken by Xi Jinping, who is proving to be China’s strongest leader since Mao and Deng. François Godement moves from the inner workings of the Party elite to the economic policies that have made China the world’s factory while fueling growing inequality. He explains the recent turn of China’s foreign policy to assertiveness, showing its roots in domestic political competition. He illustrates this trend with the case of Sino-Japanese relations, which have fluctuated wildly since the start of the reform era in 1978. Providing rare and vivid insights into the trenches of Chinese politics, the book illuminates dramatic corruption cases, behind-the-scenes decision-making processes, and a political and intellectual establishment torn between political reform and nationalism. It will be of interest not only to academics and students but also to general readers interested in China’s political scene beyond the headlines. This book was originally published in French as “Que veut la Chine? De Mao au capitalisme” and was translated by Rhoda B. Miller.