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China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption, by Yuen Yuen Ang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 266 pp. $39.99 (Hardcover). ISBN: 9781108778350.
Only four years after her seminal book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang brings to us another thought-provoking book, China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. Like her first book, research presented in this new book is motivated by a theoretically and practically intriguing question: "Why has China grown so fast for so long despite vast corruption?" (p. 2). Building on the rich foundation of existing literature, Ang provides answers with her distinct conceptual framework and innovative perspectives.
Scholarly debates about the relationship between government corruption and economic development have been going on for decades. Conclusions based on different country cases, observations, and data are not consistent. While economists show rather confidently in recent years that corruption hurts economic growth (e.g., due to distortion of market allocation of talents and resources), the alternative narrative that corruption helps entrepreneurs circumvent cumbersome regulations and overcome the high threshold of firm entry never fades away. China, more specifically, has been a crucial case in the heated debate: decades of continuous economic bloom have been coupled with consistent, if not increased, corruption. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that corruption in China has been receiving substantial attention from generations of China scholars, such as Ting Gong, Melanie Manion, Yan Sun, Andrew Wedeman, Minxin Pei, and Xiaobo Lu, to name just a few whose works have inspired tons of later research, including my own. Among this wealth of research, particular work of high relevance to the unusual pattern of the coexistence of high levels of corruption and long-term fast economic growth in China is Andrew Wedeman's Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). Through tracing the sequence of economic reform, Wedeman explains the puzzle by arguing that corruption in China intensified over time and transformed into higher-stakes transactive corruption in...