Stealing from the Farmers: Institutional Corruption and the 1992 IOU Crisis

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Abstract
In recent years, sinologists and leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have come to view “endemic” corruption as the “Achilles′ heel” of Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Corruption, they assert, has weakened the Party and threatens to push it into a “life and death” crisis of legitimacy. Such views accord with a conventional wisdom that treats corruption as the episodic and catastrophic variable in a punctuated equilibrium model. In this construct, although it may generate political discontent and mass alienation, corruption lies dormant most of the time and only becomes politically significant when both the stakes involved and the number of officials engaged in corruption reach extraordinary levels, and the regime fails to bring corruption under control, at which point it becomes a factor in mobilizing anti-government agitation.3 Without such crises, corruption's tangible political consequences remain quite limited or at least latent.

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