In Chapter 7, I review my key arguments and revisit the comparison of reform-era China to America’s Gilded Age using historical data on reported corruption to highlight their similarities and differences. Finally, I explore the implications of this book for big questions in Chinese political economy and in corruption and capitalism more broadly.

Why has China’s economy boomed despite vast corruption? In fact, China is not as exceptional as we think it is – the closest parallel is the United States in the late nineteenth century. What we have witnessed since 1978 is China’s Gilded Age in the making. The assumption that all corruption hampers growth is over-simplistic. I present my framework for unbundling corruption into four qualitatively distinct categories. The key argument is that, while corruption is never good for the economy, not all forms of corruption are equally bad, and nor do they cause the same kind of harm. Access money is a type of corruption that can stimulate growth but causes structural distortions. On the basis of this framework, I advance a four-pronged explanation for the Chinese paradox: access money dominates; China’s political system operates on a profit-sharing model; capacity-building reforms have curtailed damaging forms of corruption; regional competition checks predatory corruption, spurs developmental efforts, and ratchets up deals.

The previous chapter examined the range of reward plans associated with the recognition and reward of individual behaviour and/or results. This chapter focuses on plans where reward outcomes are contingent on measures of collective results; that is, on collective incentive plans. Because such plans are generally geared to measures of group results over a relatively brief time frame – typically monthly, quarterly or annually – they are also known as collective or group short-term incentive plans, or ‘STIs’.

We begin our exploration of collective STIs by outlining the general rationale for such plans and by overviewing the four main plan types: profit-sharing, gainsharing, goal-sharing and team incentives. Subsequent sections explore each of these four plan types in more detail, noting the advantages and disadvantages of each. Consistent with the approach taken in earlier chapters, a final section considers the strategic priorities to which each plan type would be most and least appropriate.