The coexistence of widespread corruption and sustained high growth in China seems paradoxical against the generally found negative cross-sectional correlation between corruption and economic performance. This common wisdom, however, tells us little about the structure of corruption nor its evolution with the economy. By “unbundling corruption” into qualitatively distinct types, Ang not only places post-1978 China in a comparative-historical perspective but refreshes the general framework to study the relationship between corruption and growth. In China and elsewhere, as she convincingly demonstrates, capitalist growth was accompanied not by the eradication of corruption but by its evolution from extortion, embezzlement, and petty bribes toward sophisticated exchanges of power and profit.
Instead of measuring corruption as a unitary score, as has become standard practice in statistical studies, Ang takes the qualitative intuitions in existing scholarship a step further to “unbundle corruption” along two dimensions—the nature of the exchange (theft vs. exchange) and the...