Making Business Personal: Corruption, Anti-Corruption, and Elite Networks in Post-Mao China

The author examines the consequences of governance and economic reform efforts in post-Mao China through an ethnographic examination of state audits, market reforms and anti-corruption campaigns. The article traces the evolution of elite networks composed of businesspeople and state officials that emerged from China’s economic reforms, and argues that these networks themselves form the social basis of corruption in post-Mao China. Through examining these networks, the author intends to expose the logics of quantification and commensurability that are associated with capitalism and argue that they are often rooted in kinship, affect and pleasure. In this sense, the analysis intends to show that systems put in place in order to foster accountability, can in fact generate the opposite of desired effects.