Abstract

While corruption is an age-old practice, it was in the 1990s that Western financial institutions identified corruption as an urgent problem for economic development in the Global South. In the case of China and Latin America specifically, deep traditions of informality, personal connections, and bribery in both regions heightened worries about corruption's potential role within burgeoning trans-Pacific relations, despite active anti-corruption policies within each country. Rather than evaluating the instrumental effects of these measures, this article highlights the generative potential of anti-corruption policies for Chinese state employees working in Latin America. Specifically, I use an ethnographic lens to explore how Chinese anti-corruption policies have shaped the entrepreneurial imagination and initiatives of Chinese development agents in Costa Rica. In doing so, I highlight how anti-corruption measures proliferate certain kinds of entrepreneurial ventures and subjects while foreclosing the possibility of others, effectively restructuring how business can be done. As such, I argue that anti-corruption policies cannot be understood as simply extending neoliberal privatization or consolidating authoritarian state control; instead, I show how these policies produce a complex assemblage of public-private enterprise that has become central to Chinese post-reform governance as it has gone global.

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