BOOK REVIEWS

Ning Wang, Making a Market Economy; Yan Sun, Corruption and Market in Contemporary China

These two works shed light on the conditions under which, in the course of the last 25 years, the command economy has been dismantled and gradually replaced by a market system in China . Yan Sun, a professor of political science, is interested in corruption from a double perspective, both at the macro and the micro level. Ning Wang, a neo-institutionalist economist, asks how, thanks to the reforms, a region (Jingzhou, south of Hubei ) has been converted to pisciculture.
Corruption is a crucial question, since it threatens both social stability – it has direct consequences for the distribution of wealth – and the legitimacy of political power – it provokes popular discontent. Yan Sun’s work sets out a broad panorama of corrupt practices that have been employed since 1978, understood in the (restricted) sense to which the Chinese judicial apparatus extends, that is to say “the abuses of power committed by officials of the State and of the Party to the benefit of private interests.