Yuen Yuen Ang

“China is corrupt” – that simple, and often unquestioned, statement hides a deceptively complex web of assumptions. It’s easy to say a country is corrupt; far harder is defining that corruption, measuring it, and trying to understand the complicated relationship between corruption and economic growth. That’s the monumental project undertaken by Yuen Yuen Ang in her latest book, China’s Gilded Age: the Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption. Ang is a professor of political science and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow as well as the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap and China’s Gilded Age. 

Her new book is especially timely, as the COVID-19 pandemic has cast a harsh spotlight on China’s political system even while calling into question its (and the world’s) continued economic growth. Below, The Diplomat interviews Ang about her research into corruption in China, its impact on the economy, and the connection to the country’s handling of the novel coronavirus.

In short, according to your research, why has China’s economy grown so fast for so long despite massive corruption?

Not all corruption dampens growth, nor do they cause the same kind of harm. The type of corruption that prevails in China – what I call “access money” – has spurred rapid growth, and even over-investment in speculative sectors, while producing serious risks for the economy and political system.

In order to make sense of the paradox of corruption and economic boom, we must first challenge the deeply held assumption that all corruption impedes growth. Such a fallacy is being reinforced by global indices of corruption – notably, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) – which measures corruption as a one-dimensional problem: one score for every country. Consistently, in these indices, poor countries rank at the bottom and rich countries at the top, which gives the simplistic impression that corruption must always hurt economic growth.

The likes of CPI fail to unbundle corruption into qualitatively different types. My book provides this unbundling, by advancing a typology of four distinct types of corruption (access money, speed money, petty theft, and grand theft) and then measuring it across 15 countries, including China, in a pilot expert survey. I call this alternative measure the Unbundled Corruption Index^TM (see Chapter 2 of China’s Gilded Age and my November 2019 article in Global Perspectives, “Unbundling Corruption.”)