POLITICAL ECONOMY: Professor Andrew Wedeman (Georgia State University)
The Third Paradox: Rapid Growth, Rising Corruption, and Regime Integrity in China
In Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China, I argued that the puzzle of concurrent high-speed growth and widespread anarchic corruption that followed the deepening of market reforms in the early 1990s could be explained in part by the party’s launching of a sustained series of anti-corruption drives. A new drive against high-level corruption ordered by Xi Jinping in 2013, however, revealed that not only had high-level corruption worsened in the face of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao’s attacks on mid-level corruption, Xi’s dramatic “tiger hunt” has failed to make significant gains despite the detention of over 525 senior officials over the past decade and a half. The number of tigers detained in recent years has, in fact, exceeded the number detained during the first years of Xi’s crackdown. In my new book project The Third Paradox: Rapid Growth, Rising Corruption, and Regime Integrity in China, I argue that the party finds itself locked into a “forever war” in which it must keep vigorously fighting corruption but is unlikely to prevent the regeneration of widespread corruption within the party-state.
Date
Wednesday, 02 September 2026
Time
9am to 10:30am
Venue
Joint ZOOM Webinar with Academia Sinica, NTU Taiwan, and CEIBS Shanghai