According to conventional wisdom, rising corruption reduces economic growth. And yet, between 1978 and 2010, even as officials were looting state coffers, extorting bribes, raking in kickbacks, and scraping off rents at unprecedented rates, the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of 9 percent. In Double Paradox, Andrew Wedeman seeks to explain why the Chinese economy performed so well despite widespread corruption at almost kleptocratic levels.Wedeman finds that the Chinese economy was able to survive predatory corruption because corruption did not explode until after economic reforms had unleashed dynamic growth. To a considerable extent corruption was also a by-product of the transfer of undervalued assets from the state to the emerging private and corporate sectors and a scramble to capture the windfall profits created by their transfer. Perhaps most critically, an anticorruption campaign, however flawed, has proved sufficient to prevent corruption from spiraling out of control. Drawing on more than three decades of data from China―as well as examples of the interplay between corruption and growth in South Korea, Taiwan, Equatorial Guinea, and other nations in Africa and the Caribbean―Wedeman cautions that rapid growth requires not only ongoing and improved anticorruption efforts but also consolidated and strengthened property rights.

Product Description: Official corruption has become increasingly prevalent around the world since the early 1990s. The situation appears to be particularly acute in the post-communist states. Corruption—be it real or perceived—is a major problem with concrete implications, including a lowered likelihood of foreign investment...read more

Product Description: Official corruption has become increasingly prevalent around the world since the early 1990s. The situation appears to be particularly acute in the post-communist states. Corruption—be it real or perceived—is a major problem with concrete implications, including a lowered likelihood of foreign investment...read more

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.

Product Description: The most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of corruption and change in the Chinese Communist Party, Cadres and Corruption reveals the long history of the party's inability to maintain a corps of committed and disciplined cadres...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Wei-Arthus (sociology, Weber State U., Utah) experienced the Cultural Revolution which ended in 1976. Via a study of authority and human relations in urban work units in ten cities, she offers insights into the Chinese paradox of economic liberalization in the shadow of political authoritarianism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first original book-length study of corruption in the People's Republic of China. The work relates the corruption issue to ongoing political processes and policies of the Chinese Communist Party by examining the broader context of social transformation, consolidation, and modernization in post-1949 China...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A comparison of politics and the corruption that exists in Hong Kong and China. In Hong Kong the accumulation of capital rules with little democratic check in a colonial setting, while in China it has varied from a crime close to treason to a sign of progress.