| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Xiaobo Lü. Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party. (Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xviii, 368. $55.00.

In this study, Xiaobo Lü asks why Communist societies become corrupt. His focus is on his native China, ranked among the world's most corrupt countries, and on official (or cadre) corruption, China's most pressing social ill. He looks chiefly at minor officials, whose misdemeanors are most likely to cause popular discontent. His method is historical and sociological. The result is the most exhaustive treatment to date of the genesis of Chinese official corruption since 1949, and a comprehensive taxonomy of its forms. 1

Corruption is always difficult to research, particularly in a country like China, where its main practitioners control much of the flow of information. Lü adopts various approaches to resolve this difficulty. These range from interviews with anonymous informants to the analysis of local gazetteers (which resumed publication in the late twentieth century), of "internal" (or classified) reports normally unavailable to outsiders, and of baogao wenxue or "reportage" (investigative journalism posing as literature), all useful windows onto China's underside. . . .

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