Minxin Pei: China’s Crony Capitalism – The Dynamics of Regime DecayCarolin Kautz

ASIEN – Nr. 148 (2018) pp. 106–107

Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2016. 376 S., 31,50 EUR

With his recent work on China’s crony capitalism, Minxin Pei produces an extensive and detailed study on phenomena of corruption in present-day China. He does not solely focus on corruption as a phenomenon in general, but narrows his analysis on what he calls crony capitalism. He first defines crony capitalism broadly as “an institutional union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power” (p. 7). With this concept being rather broad and a difficult basis for analysis, however, he operationalizes crony capitalism as “collusion among elites” (p. 7). Pei observes that elite collusion is a phenomenon that only arose in China in the 1990s and has not been observed beforehand in the early days of reform throughout the 1980s…