Commissioned Book Review: Yuen Yuen Ang, China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221117452 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(1) NP1 –NP2
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1117452PSW0010.1177/14789299221117452Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of
Economic Boom and Vast Corruption by
Yuen Yuen Ang. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020. xv + 266 pp., £29.99,
$39.99, ISBN 9781108478601
The lexical import of a word like “corruption” is
so politically charged that parsing it may place
any social-scientist, however well-intentioned,
between a rock and a hard place. Suggesting that
in some cases corruption actually serves a social
good seems prima facie so morally reprehensi-
ble that one immediately abandons one’s meth-
odological analysis and makes way for the
soapbox. On the other hand, blanket condemna-
tions of corruption do little to allow us to see
how it actually functions. Yuen Yuen Ang says
that “corruption is never good” (p. 11) though
follows immediately by noting that “not all
forms of corruption are equally bad” (p. 11).
While the latter is an empirical judgment, the
former is a normative one. If the former state-
ment implies that corruption is something we
ought to eradicate, the latter statement hedges
somewhat by allowing us to manage it better.
Ang’s study thus convincingly untangles a
chiastic paradox; while some countries are both
poor and corrupt, others are rich and corrupt.
How can this be? Ang provides an answer by
splitting corruption into four types: petty theft,
grand theft, speed money, and access money.
Where the first two differentiate between sums
stolen (which always act as deadweights to the
economy), the last two actually involve social
exchanges that can result in improved social out-
comes. Embezzlement of state funds (moving
funds allocated to the public into a private bank
account, for example) is merely a “grand” occur-
rence of otherwise “petty theft” (p. 28) (i.e. the
unjust extortion of rents). But “speed money”
(petty bribes paid to avoid delays), and its more
robust manifestation as “access money” (i.e.
businessmen paying politicians massive bribes
for contracts), is simply how things get done.
Ang suggests that the facile equation of a coun-
try’s poverty to societal corruption ignores the
type of corruption at play. Acts of theft provide
no social good; hence, countries like Nigeria
and India are both corrupt and poor. Yet lump-
ing all forms of corruption together ignores the
large-scale prevalence of corruption in places
like the United States and China, which are cor-
rupt but also rich. Both the United States and
China, that is, have managed to eradicate small-
scale bribes and grand theft; yet both, to their
extreme benefit, have tied massive graft to
performance-based private-sector outcomes.
The United States does this through a legalized
process called lobbying; China, on the other
hand, internalizes their “profit sharing” (p. 85)
mechanism within the Communist Party. In
the United S tates, a Fortune 500 company on K
Street might donate heavily to a Congressman’s
campaign in exchange for favors. In China, a
Party member works with entrepreneurial spirit
to expand the tax base; such expansion necessi-
tates developing large-scale business projects
whereby many sides share in the sp oils. Merel y
extorting taxes and fees from a limited pool is
not the goal; rather, in China specifically,
an incentive exists to curb petty corruption
and raise GDP through social and monetary
exchange where everybod y (i.e. more than just
Party officials) benefits.
The book’s title highlights China’s progres-
sion through an age of similar “crony capital-
ism” in America:
The Gilded Age [1870-1900] was an era of
crony capitalism, but these were also years of
extraordinary growth and transformation . . .
In this century, the United States overtook
the United Kingdom to become the factory
of the world, even as corruption flourished.
Today, China is passing through something
similar (p. 181).
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