“To get rich is glorious,” declared Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China’s economic miracle – but there has been a dark side to this rush to glory and riches, both for the winners and for those who have been left behind.In Everything is Allowed, Nothing is Permitted Robert Foyle Hunwick tells the hidden story of how crime, vice and corruption have flourished in modern China. From the outbreaks of politicized lawlessness in the Mao years, the book charts the flourishing of criminality in the era of opening and reform through to the present day “strike hard” campaigns against corruption under Xi Jinping. There are stories here of business ‘fixers’, corrupt rural elites, notorious serial killers, spiralling drug use and the flourishing sex trade in China’s urban centres. Hunwick looks beyond the official propaganda of a united and peaceful state to reveal a nation that is both built on and existentially threatened by an intricate economy of violence, dark money, power and influence.
