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Everything is Allowed, Nothing is Permitted
Vice, Crime and Corruption in New China
Everything is Allowed, Nothing is Permitted
Vice, Crime and Corruption in New China
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Description
“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.
Table of Contents
1. Thirty Years Without Law (1949-1983)
2. 1983: A Most Violent Year
3. House of Cadres: How Corruption Ate Capitalism
4. In the KTV: Sex and the 'Hottie Economy'
5. Scary Monsters, Super Creeps: Serial Killers, Kidnappers, and Spree Murderers
6. Death in the Country: Crime and the Rural Divide
Epilogue: The State of Surveillance
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | Mar 19 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 240 |
| ISBN | 9781838605094 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Beneath the party platitudes and state media hosannas on China's phenomenal development over the past few decades, there is another story. One which Robert Hunwick uncovers with tireless research and a storyteller's eye for a gripping narrative.
Jeremiah Jenne, Writer and Historian, China
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Everything is Allowed, Nothing is Permitted explores a China rarely featured in books or articles which often focus on economics and political drama over societal realities… there is another side of China, darker, deeper underground, not seen in any Chinese or English literature, but nevertheless just as important. Robert Foyle Hunwick provides a glimpse of that world.
Karoline Kan, journalist and author of "Under Red Skies: The Life and Times of a Chinese Millennial"
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A vivid account of a Chinese society rarely seen by outsiders, Everything is Allowed, Nothing is Permitted is full of insight, first-hand details, and anecdotes that pay testament to the author's deep research.
Phoebe Zhang, South China Morning Post























