Chapter 3 examines howaccess money came to dominate China’s structure of corruption. Contrary to popular claims of “rising” corruption, I show that, since the 2000s, only bribery has exploded, both in frequency and in scale, while embezzlement, misappropriation of public funds, and bureaucratic extortion have declined. Two forces drove this evolution: the expansion of markets after 1993 and the central government’s rollout of capacity-building measures in 1998.

Why has China’s economy boomed despite vast corruption? In fact, China is not as exceptional as we think it is – the closest parallel is the United States in the late nineteenth century. What we have witnessed since 1978 is China’s Gilded Age in the making. The assumption that all corruption hampers growth is over-simplistic. I present my framework for unbundling corruption into four qualitatively distinct categories. The key argument is that, while corruption is never good for the economy, not all forms of corruption are equally bad, and nor do they cause the same kind of harm. Access money is a type of corruption that can stimulate growth but causes structural distortions. On the basis of this framework, I advance a four-pronged explanation for the Chinese paradox: access money dominates; China’s political system operates on a profit-sharing model; capacity-building reforms have curtailed damaging forms of corruption; regional competition checks predatory corruption, spurs developmental efforts, and ratchets up deals.