Chapter 4 assesses corruption control efforts by South Korea’s military-back authoritarian governments between the 1960s and 1980s. I argue that Park Chung-hee was a motivated reformer and had sufficient state capacity at his disposal but initially faced too many constraints on his leadership to curb corruption. Park came to power in a coup in 1961 and, as promised, launched a crackdown on corrupt politicians and businesspeople. However, Park had to contend with quasi-democratic institutions, powerful private economic actors, and other factors that made following through on anti-corruption reforms politically infeasible. This changed after Park consolidated personal power in the early 1970s, especially through the passage of the repressive Yushin constitution in 1972. Park was able to enact the General Administrative Reform (1973–77) to reduce corruption and strengthen South Korea’s developmental state. This chapter also discusses Chun Doo-hwan’s Purification campaign (1980–81), which was a more typical case of superficial anti-corruption efforts by an autocrat motivated by narrowly political considerations.

Chapter 6 presents a case study of Xi Jinping’s wide-ranging anti-corruption campaign. By all accounts, corruption continued to grow in China throughout the 1990s and 2000s and became among the public’s largest governance concerns. Xi and other party leaders believed that the combination under the Hu Jintao administration of policy failings like the spread of corruption, risky political liberalization, and general party weakness was precipitating a crisis in the CCP’s ability to govern. Since 2012, Xi has pursued anti-corruption campaign as part of his broader mission to restore party discipline and reassert party leadership over China’s state and society. I argue that his administration’s campaign, though not yet finished, has already been successful in curbing corruption. Furthermore, corruption was curbed under Xi using decidedly authoritarian methods. Benefiting Xi was the fact that he has faced far fewer constraints on his leadership than Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin did early in their administrations. The larger political implication of my findings in this chapter is that Xi is succeeding in strengthening CCP organization and discipline, which likely helps prolong one-party rule.

Chapter 2 covers theory and methodology. In the theory section, I elaborate on the conventional wisdom about authoritarian corruption control, consider several alternative explanations, and then present my argument in full. In the methodology section, I develop my proposed scoring system for anti-corruption efforts, describe how political factors such as discretionary power are assessed, defend my case selection, and give a brief overview of the sources used.

Chapter 4 analyzes how mineral resources shape the state–capital relations in resource-rich regions. It argues that the symbiotic relationship between local state and resource capital can easily become collusive under the resource boom. Through studies of resource-related corruption cases, it demonstrates how the state’s regulation and interference in the resource sector create structural opportunities for rent seeking and collusion between the regulators and regulatees and how the resource windfalls turn local government departments into hotbeds for corruption. Through panel data analysis on the corruption rates of Chinese provinces, it testifies that resource-rich regions are indeed more corrupt than other regions. This chapter suggests that mineral resources amplify the existing loopholes in the Chinese political economic system and highlights the danger of local state capture by resource capital.

Based on the findings of the empirical chapters, Chapter 6 recapitulates the impacts that rich mineral resources generate on the state–capital–labor triad in China. It analyzes in detail the Chinese state’s coping strategies to mitigate the resource curse at local levels. Moreover, it explains why the Chinese state is able and willing to take the observed strategies to contain the resource curse. The key lies in the Chinese Communist Party-state’s strong capacity to penetrate into the economy and the society and also in its top-down monitoring and tight control of the local agents. In the end, this chapter critically evaluates the successes and pitfalls of the China model of resource management.

Physical possession is among the legal standards Chinese judges can apply in child custody determinations: whether a change in the status quo would undermine the best interests of the child. Because children in rural areas overwhelmingly live with their fathers or paternal grandparents, and because judges overwhelmingly apply this physical possession standard, judges’ child custody orders are entirely consistent with the adage, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” Women who fled domestic violence often left their children behind in the possession of their abusive husbands. Because defendants, simply by withholding consent, could so easily prevent courts from granting divorces, women frequently bargained away their child custody rights in exchange for their freedom. In both scenarios, courts deferred to the patriarchal order by privileging fathers’ child custody claims. Even when there were compelling and legally justifiable grounds for rejecting the status quo on the grounds that it posed a safety risk to the child, judges nonetheless tended to apply the physical possession standard. Judges had no apparent hesitation to grant custody to perpetrators of domestic violence.

Chapter 2 opens with a description of mineral resource distribution and the development of mining industries in reform-era China. It then examines the impacts of resource endowment on local economic development, with a focus on capital accumulation and investment. Through qualititative studies on mining entrepreneurs and statistical analysis on Chinese provinces, it shows that resource boom in general benefits capital by not only boosting capital accumulation in the mining industries but also generating positive spillover effects on other industrial sectors, especially those labor-intensive ones. However, resource-generated capital tends to impede the investment in high-tech industries and induce speculative investment in real estate, which may discourage industrial upgrading and undermine economic growth in the long run. Therefore, resource boom has rather mixed effects on local economic development.

Chapter 5 analyzes how mineral resources affect local provision of public goods. Through case studies and statistical analysis, it shows that local governments in resource-rich regions tend to spend less on human capital-developing public goods, including education and health care, due to the diminished demand for labor, the myopic decision-making of both citizens and officials, and the shedding of government responsibilities onto mining enterprises. On the other hand, wary of the tension between mining industries and local citizens and driven by the pressure to preserve social stability, the local governments in resource-rich regions spend more fiscal revenue on social security benefits for disadvantaged citizens. The redistribution of the resource wealth from resource capital to labor partially compensates for the latter’s welfare losses. Overall, while resource-rich regions have weak incentives to invest in human capital development, they do spend more on redistributive policies to redress popular grievance and ameliorate resource-triggered social conflicts.

The first part of this chapter is devoted to a computational analysis of judicial discourse in written court decisions. Chinese judges ignored domestic violence allegations in the process of denying divorce petitions. When often justified doing so on ideological, moral, and therapeutic grounds. Although divorce litigation was rife with allegations of domestic violence, they had no discernable effect on the character of judicial discourse in court holdings. Regardless of domestic violence claims, judges focused on couples’ reconciliation potential and provided paternalistic and patronizing relationship advice. Judicial discourse was gendered insofar as judges directed such gaslighting strategies toward women more than toward men. The second part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of judicial decision-making: (1) the extent and nature of gender inequality in case outcomes, and (2) the effect of domestic violence allegations on case outcomes. Judges took the claims and interests of men more seriously than those of women. Domestic violence did not move the needle toward divorce. Victims of domestic violence, mostly women, were revictimized by judges who ignored their claims.