Book review: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination: Comparisons with Hong Kong and Vietnam

Abstract

overlooked the fact that access money can delay economic growth, especially when political elites and public officials seek huge economic rents while consumers and private companies have to bear the high price of real estate and uncertainties and risks related to the security of projects. In other words, corruption is not a good thing regardless of the types of corruption, even though access money can exist alongside rapid economic growth in transitional China. The suggestion in Chapter 6 is that the ongoing anti-corruption campaign tends to disincentivize public officials to advance China’s economic development because the profit-sharing model carries risks in the current political environment (p. 174). An alternative explanation could be that economic upgrading from labour-intensive manufacturing to technology-driven industries causes a slowing down of the Chinese economy. This is an excellent and well-written book suited for a diverse audience in the field of China studies. Despite a plethora of scholarly works on China’s vast corruption and rising growth, the book succeeds in taking a fresh approach to examine this co-evolutionary relationship with convincing evidence. It also makes an innovative contribution to the study of China’s corruption and the political economy of the transitional state from a comparative perspective.