Minxin Pei

Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. Pei was previously a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as the director of its China Program from 2004 to 2008. He was an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998. His research focuses on democratization in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations.

Pei is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006). His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and many edited books. Pei's op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek International, The Wall Street Journal, and The International Herald Tribune. He is a columnist for The Indian Express and L’espresso and is a regular contributor to The Diplomat.

Pei received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

_{May 2012}

China’s Crony Capitalism

Minxin Pei

When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property—in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly.Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay. —Harvard University Press{chop}

Is the Growing Pessimism About China Warranted?

David Shambaugh, David M. Lampton & more

from Washington Quarterly

There are few more consequential questions in world affairs than China’s uncertain future trajectory. Assumptions of a reformist China integrated into the international community have given way in recent years to serious concerns about the nation’s...

Minxin Pei

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China’s Crony Capitalism

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Is the Growing Pessimism About China Warranted?

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