china's gilded age

Why has China's economy grown so fast for so long despite vast corruption? The answer lies in the type of corruption that prevailed. Over the past four decades, corruption in China has evolved away from thuggery and theft toward access money - elite exchanges of power and wealth. Such transactional corruption was intimately bound up with feverish investment, but it also bred systemic risks and inequality.

 Contemporary China is a newcomer on an evolutionary path taken by Western capitalist societies when they were developing.

Douglass North Best Book Award, Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics (SIOE)

Alice Amsden Book Award, Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)

Honorable Mention, Barrington Moore Book Award, American Sociological Association 

Feature interview in Freakonomics Radio

Full-page review in The Economist 

Mentioned in media outlets worldwide including BBC News, Indian Express, Financial Times, The New York Times 

 REVIEWS

She develops an innovative methodology to capture the multidimensional nature of corruption, which extends the contribution of her research well beyond China, helping to disentangle the relationship between corruption and development more broadly. 

This outstanding book has already made substantial waves in academia and in policy circles, and we are confident that it will influence the direction of research on corruption for years to come. 

Path-breaking study … original and convincing.

A fresh and penetrating new perspective to one of the central puzzles of the current era - and reminds Americans of the deep-seated corruption of their own early period of rapid industrialization.

A book that combines deep insight into how the Chinese system works with innovative research 

Her latest offering is broadly important, intellectually solid, immensely interesting and uniquely accessible to scholars, practitioners, and lay readers alike. It will be an academic blockbuster.

The book in fact presents serious data and argumentation in favor of those propositions, and thus it is significantly more useful than most of the China books you will read. 

A thought-provoking new book... The book is not a defence of corruption. Like steroids, access money promotes unbalanced growth, it notes.

This book combines innovative methodology, rigorous research, and lucid writing. It makes a major contribution to studies of contemporary political economy and carries crucial implications of practicality beyond the academy. 

Ang also points to biases that infect how Western analysts look at corruption in developing countries as well as their own... More troubling for an American reader, Ang shows that the "ideal conditions" themselves conceal the corruption that continues to exist in Western societies in an institutionalized, transactional form. 

In Ang’s approach, China’s recent history can be best grasped if it is examined using a transnational and long-range historical perspective. She reminds us that China’s socio-economic revolution is no novelty but rather shares important traits with past moments of capitalist expansion... Any global understanding of neoliberalism as a world-reshaping force... must bear Ang’s central lesson in mind. 

Ang's UCI  [Unbundled Corruption Index] is one the most exciting innovations in the field in over a decade, and it or its future progeny may very well become a game changer.

I learned more from @yuenyuenang about the many varieties of corruption in China in this 30 minute podcast than I have in the years of following this issue. 

IF YOU WISH TO READ A SUMMARY

Book review by Diego Castañeda Garza, LSE Review of Books [Link] (in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese)

It rebels against China’s exceptionalism narrative (and, I would argue, against all such exceptionalisms) in contrasting contemporary China with the nineteenth-century United States.  

Book review by Jiangnan Zhu, China Review [pdf]

Only four years after her seminal book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Yuen Yuen Ang brings to us another thought-provoking book. 

Ang creatively produces the Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI) (Chapter 2) ... This classification enables us to put regions that are commonly assumed to have drastically different corruption landscapes (e.g., the United States and China) on a comparable horizon.

Book review by Andrew Nathan, Foreign Affairs [link] 

A book that combines deep insight into how the Chinese system works with innovative research 

Book review by Zhang Meng, Journal of Interdisciplinary History [pdf] 

Economic historians can take a leaf from Ang’s “unbundling corruption” approach.

Book review by Jack Katzenstein, Journal of International Law & Politics [pdf] 

Indeed, while this is a book about China, one of Ang's most potent ideas is that we should look at institutionalized transactional corruption in the United States as merely another type of corruption, rather than as a non-corrupt or post-corrupt system.

Book review by Brandon Cordeiro, Syndemic [link] 

In Ang’s approach, China’s recent history can be best grasped if it is examined using a transnational and long-range historical perspective... China’s Gilded Age also obliges readers to reconsider corruption in the West, where the public power of private wealth has become a blatant element of the neoliberal order.  

Book review on Nextier (Nigeria) [pdf] 

Governments should use this new typology of corruption to seek a more in-depth understanding of the type of monster they seek to cage. This understanding should inform the anti-corruption strategy in different countries. 

Blog response by Nick Williamson, LSE International Development [link] 

Steroids is a metaphor clearly chosen with care. Access money can enable enterprises to gain tax breaks or land-access for large-scale projects, which arguably leads to economic expansion. Like steroids, however, these economic injections pose serious risks. 

SELECTED BOOK TALKS

"The Role of Corruption in China's Speedy, Risky Boom," Stanford University APARC, 2021 

Overview of China's Gilded Age, University of California San Diego, 2020

"China's Corrupt Meritocracy," Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, 2021

"Unbundling Corruption" (on the Unbundled Corruption Index) LSE Cutting Edge Series in Development, 2021

 SAMPLE CHAPTER & MORE

Sample chapter

Read the Introduction Chapter here [pdf]

Read Chapter 4, "Profit-Sharing, Chinese Style" here [SSRN] 

Audio excerpt 

Conclusion, “Rethinking 9 Big Questions,” Narrated by Prof. Alice Evans, Listen on iTunes and Spotify

Short pieces adapted from book

"Can Xi End China's Gilded Age?" Project Syndicate. 21 September 2021. [pdf]

“Unbundling Corruption: Why it Matters and How to Do It,” OECD Development Matters Blog, 25 June, 2020. 

“China’s Corrupt Meritocracy,” Project Syndicate, 4 October 2019. [pdf in English] 

“Unbundling Corruption: Revisiting Six Questions on Corruption,” Global Perspectives, April 2020 [pdf]

Extended Appendix 

This is an extended appendix on the Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI), which appears in Chapter 2. [pdf]