If you are skeptical about American corruption, consider a few very recent headlines. And China is still a newcomer in this process. Instead, it evolved in structure and form and became more sophisticated. It’s not true that corruption disappeared as countries became richer. But, she argues, corruption didn’t just evaporate in the U.S.ĪNG: There is, I would argue, a historical pattern in the evolution of corruption in capitalism. But Yuen Yuen Ang says it’s not so straightforward.ĪNG: So my core argument is what we see in China today is basically what we would find in the U.S. The United States, meanwhile, ranks much lower on the Transparency International corruption index. Some scholars argue that corruption poses an existential threat to China, and president Xi Jinping seems to agree: since he took over, in 2012, he has led a crackdown in which more than 1.5 million government officials have been disciplined, with thousands sent to prison. And corruption in China is famously high, at least according to rankings like the one from Transparency International, a German association that collects corruption data around the world. The main one is this: how has an economy like China’s been able to grow so large and so fast with such high levels of corruption? Economists usually point to corruption as an impediment to economic growth. She’s trying to answer several questions about corruption. Her analysis is based on prosecutorial data, government compensation figures, news reports - and her own interviews with more than 400 Chinese bureaucrats. She recently published a book called China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. Yuen Yuen Ang is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. But corruption in this country has become so legalized and institutionalized, it’s hard to say that it’s “corrupt.” Some people would be really offended by the word. Corruption in China is still of an illegal form. Yuen Yuen ANG: The best way to understand China’s political system is that it is a corrupt meritocracy.ĭUBNER: If I were to ask you to point to another corrupt meritocracy - maybe it’s even one where you and I are both located at the moment - what would you say?ĪNG: I think it’s more complicated in this country. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.
Listen and follow our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s just that most American corruption is essentially legal. A new book by an unorthodox political scientist argues that the two rivals have more in common than we’d like to admit.
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