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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Vivian Jing Zhan, "China's Contained Resource Curse: How Minerals Shape State Capital Labor Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Description: Contrary to intuition, many countries have found that having abundant natural resources such as petroleum or diamonds may be a curse as much as a blessing. Broad-based economic development may be stunted as resource extraction dominates the economy, and politics may be corrupted as different interest groups focus on controlling and redistributing resource rents instead of on governing well. In the worst cases, the fight for control over this wealth breaks into armed conflict. China is not usually considered in this light, since at the national level it has become a manufacturing powerhouse with natural resources only playing a...