A talk by Andrew Wedeman, Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. The political economy of post-Mao China confronts us with a combination of rapid growth and rising corruption that appear to contradict the conventional wisdom that corruption reduces or retards economic development. In this talk, Professor Wedeman argues that this combination has been possible because rising corruption is a dynamic response to economic reforms that have created vast amounts of new value and transferred much of that value from the state to the economy.