As much as Xue Mingjian trumpeted the benefits of “labor kindness” in his creation of an enterprise welfare community at the Shenxin Number Three Mill in Wuxi, only a handful of other factories pursued Xue's strategy to fuse scientific management with Confucian benevolence. A few large-scale enterprises in Shanghai under British, Japanese, and Chinese ownership – such as the plants operated by the British American Tobacco Company, Naga Wata Textile Corporation, the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, and the Commercial Press – did offer employees limited nonwage benefits. In the thousands of small manufacturing workshops in Chinese cities, owners at times extended certain benefits to apprentices and employees. Even labor contractors were nominally responsible for providing workers with housing, food, and clothing. However, the fact that owners and managers of large factories housed workers in a primitive factory dormitory or offered simple meals in a dining hall – fees for which were commonly deducted from a worker's pay – should not be overemphasized as the “sprouts” that eventually grew into the work-unit structure of the 1950s. In most cases in the 1930s, managerial provision of housing and food simply helped to ease the inconvenience of journeying back and forth from a distant dwelling for meals and rest. Such examples of nonwage benefits were qualitatively different from the kind of enterprise welfare measures that became standard practice in large state-owned enterprises by the late 1940s.

One of the central tenets of China's industrialization strategy during the 1950s (and beyond) was the rapid accumulation of investment capital through state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs were guaranteed low state-set prices on raw materials and other inputs, while profits were assured through higher prices on manufactured goods. Almost all SOE profits were turned over to the state in the form of taxes, which could then be used for additional investment capital. The adoption of this capital accumulation development strategy, with its emphasis on heavy industry, arose both from socialist ideology and the CCP's assessment of the hostile international environment in the 1950s. It is worth summarizing the key elements of the centrally planned economy of the 1950s and how in particular these constraints played out within the microeconomy of the state enterprise and its labor management policies.

During the First Five-Year Plan, employment in industrial enterprises (both state and nonstate) rose from 5.1 million in late 1952 to 7.47 million by late 1957, an average annual increase of 9.3 percent. Consistent with China's emphasis on heavy industry, workers in this sector numbered 4.5 million by year-end 1957 while light industry accounted for 2.97 million employees. In 1952, the distribution of employment between light and heavy industry had been much more evenly balanced, with 2.3 million workers in light industry and 2.8 million in heavy industry.

In the spring of 1933, a group of researchers from the China Economic Statistics Institute (CESI), with the backing of the Nationalist government, set out to conduct China's first comprehensive industrial census. The motivation for the census, as laid out in the preface of the eventual report published in 1937, was explicit: accurate industrial statistics were an indispensable element of national defense. The author of the preface noted that during the European War (World War I), the governments of several Western nations including the United States had established wartime industrial management boards that among other things conducted national censuses to measure industrial capacity. The census report's publication in 1937 ironically foreshadowed China's own wartime mobilization against Japan, and the study represents one part of the Nationalist government's broader state-building effort in the 1930s.

The census-taking process and the obstacles that the CESI researchers encountered in their 1933–4 survey census reveals something of the limits of central government power in relation to local officialdom. For example, Shanghai authorities refused to grant permission to the census takers to carry out their survey, a stance that posed obvious problems for the research effort because a large percentage of China's industrial base was located there. According to the author of the census report, the Shanghai municipal government's Bureau of Industry (gongbu ju) refused to grant permission for the census to be taken within the city's factories on the grounds that CESI was a national, not a local government entity.

This book has been about money politics in Korea and the Philippines. Money politics has been extensive, and consequential, in both countries. Although I have not focused on economic development, this book's argument leads to a natural question: why was there growth in Korea but not the Philippines? If both Korea and the Philippines were characterized by extensive political meddling into economic affairs, if influence peddling led to economic decisions made for political reasons, and if in both countries personal relationships mattered more than individual competence, then why did Korea grow so spectacularly whereas the Philippines did not? Although development is an entirely different dependent variable than money politics, it is fitting that this book concludes with a discussion of how the issues of corruption and development might relate to one another.

Money politics has always been a central aspect of the pattern of Korean and Philippine politics, and this study has shown that we cannot assume benevolence on the part of the state.

As units of the PLA advanced into urban areas of north China in early 1949, then into the cities of east, central, and south China during the remainder of that year, Communist Party officials faced a new and in many ways unfamiliar set of challenges. CCP cadres had gained some limited exposure to the complexities of urban government and industrial policy during their takeover of cities in Northeast China in 1948. Stabilizing labor relations and maintaining industrial production had been one of the critical, if not easily grasped, lessons of the 1948 urban takeovers. Yet the stakes were immensely higher in 1949, as Communist forces entered China's major commercial and industrial centers of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Industrial production and commercial activity in many of these cities had all but collapsed, but both had to be restored quickly and carefully, for political as well as national security purposes. The consequences of mismanaging the urban economy through mistaken monetary, fiscal, and industrial policies were ever present. It had only taken a few years between 1945 and 1948 for the Nationalist regime, with its much broader knowledge base of administrators and technocrats, to drive urban areas to financial ruin.

CCP officials therefore relied, however reluctantly, on the existing pool of expertise that remained from Nationalist government personnel. At the factory level, this meant a policy of retaining enterprise managers and technicians, many of whom were Nationalist “officials” simply by virtue of the fact that their enterprises were state-owned.

Imagine an Asian country that has enjoyed significant American patronage over the decades. Its people are hardworking and value education and the family. Family ties are so important that scholars and journalists call clans the basic building block of the country, and who one knows matters far more than what one can do. This country has a long history, consisting mostly of being colonized by outside powers. Since World War II, the country has been ruled by a set of elites – quasi dictators and their rich businessmen friends. Within the country its politicians switch parties at the drop of a hat. Party identification means nothing; ideology and programmatic differences are almost absent in elections; political success hinges on personalities, political manipulation, and pork-barrel politics. With episodic regularity, the country's leaders and economic elites have been either arrested or forced into exile because of recurrent corruption scandals. The local press calls corruption “our disease,” and one of the most popular topics of conversation in local drinking halls is the utter lack of qualified leadership in both the economic and the political spheres. Privilege is measured by the extent to which one is an exception to the rules.