Evolving State-Business Clientelism in China: The Institutional Organization of a Smuggling Operation.

This paper rethinks the patron-client concept to explain changes in state-business clientelism in China’s market economy. Extant studies of state-business clientelism in China define, explicitly or otherwise, patron-client ties as face-to-face gift giving interactions. While such a concept fit communist-era interactions between citizens and cadres in bounded villages and work units it does not capture the expansive possibilities for clientelism as a business strategy in the market economy. Analysis of Yuanhua Group activities, a private firm at the center of a huge smuggling operation, illuminates innovations in state-business clientelism generated by the growing economic and social capital accumulation of private entrepreneurs. Beginning with personalized gift giving to cultivate patrons in state agencies, the Yuanhua Group subsequently developed through innovative cultivation techniques of routinization, delegation, distancing, and suborning. By reducing the entrepreneurial time investment in cultivating patrons, these innovations enabled the clientelist web to expand. The suborning technique is especially significant as it moves beyond gift-giving to seek bureaucratic integration of a local state agency with the private firm’s operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]