Corruption in China is Structural; Will The Country Buckle Under It Before Reforming?

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Mr Pei's book is quietly devastating. In sober, restrained language, he exposes the full gravity of corruption in China. Presenting a wealth of evidence, he shows that this is not the unfortunate by-product of rapid economic growth but the result of strategic choices by the party. With clinical precision, Mr Pei explains how corruption operates at every level, perverting each branch of the party-state and subverting the political authority of the regime. The party cannot mitigate, let alone eradicate, "crony capitalism" because, since 1989, it has been "the very foundations of the regime's monopoly of power", the author argues. The conclusion, he believes, is that far from saving the regime, President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive may accelerate its demise by creating divisions within the ruling elite even as it reinforces strong popular resentment of corruption.

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Corruption in China has been made easy by ill-defined property rights, decentralised administrative authority and the absence of democratic checks and balances, such as an independent judiciary, a free press and political competition. Only by improving all of these can it be permanently reduced. Belatedly, the party under Mr Xi has recognised that corruption poses a mortal threat to the regime, but it has, at the same time, rejected the very reforms that offer the only prospect of a remedy.

Mr Pei grew up in Shanghai and lived there in the hopeful early 1980s, but he is not optimistic now: "Even a revolutionary overthrow of the old order may not usher in the dawn of a liberal democracy. The legacies of crony capitalism...will enable those who have acquired enormous illicit wealth under the old regime to wield outsized political influence in a struggling new democracy that will have poor odds of survival," he writes.