China`s crony capitalism : the dynamics of regime decay

When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in thelate 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Morethan three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded somethingvery different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: anincipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring incomeinequality and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces theorigins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reformsfrom the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public propertywithout clarifying its ownership.Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights ofstate-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials andbusinessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting ofstate-owned property—in particular land, natural resources and assets instate-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundredcorruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, privatebusinessmen and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusionamong elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, inwhich bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded.This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality andentrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficultand disorderly.Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese CommunistParty rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade ofever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advancedstage of decay.