2021-11-04
55 分钟The best way to understand China's political system is that it is a corrupt meritocracy.
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?
I think it's more complicated in this country.
Corruption in China is still of an illegal form, 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.
Yuan Yuen Ang is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
She recently published a book called China's Gilded Age, the Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption.
Her analysis is based on prosecutorial data, government compensation figures, news reports, and her own interviews with more than 400 chinese bureaucrats.
She's trying to answer several questions about corruption.
The main one is 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, 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.
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.
The United States, meanwhile, ranks much lower on the transparency International corruption index.
But Yuan Yuen Ong says it's not so straightforward.
So my core argument is what we see in China today is basically what we would find in the US in.
The last century, meaning way back in the gilded age.
But, she argues, corruption didnt just evaporate in the US.
There is, I would argue, a historical pattern in the evolution of corruption and capitalism.
Its not true that corruption disappeared as countries became richer.