First, China’s rapid economic growth has been fueled by unusually large public investment, which, consistent with my own research, does not seem to be adversely affected by corruption. Second, China’s strictly controlled society has given rise to well-organized corruption, which – as economists Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny argued in the early 1990s – is surely less harmful than the chaotic corruption experienced by, for example, the ex-Soviet countries during their early years of transition.