Corruption is typically understood as a sign of weak institutions and failed governance. But what if it is a deliberate political technology used to consolidate power, discipline rivals, and reshape political systems?

This is the argument advanced by University of Chicago sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang in the latest episode of the APARC Briefing series. Drawing on years of ethnographic research across Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Myanmar, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as offshore tax havens, Hoang uses a comparative Asian lens to show how both democratic and authoritarian governments strategically align with private capital, reinforcing elite power. Hoang joined APARC Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui to share core insights from her work.
 

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Kimberly Kay Hoang speaks on the APARC Briefing series with host Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

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She argues that corruption discourse often operates as a political tool, widely seen across Asian political economies and increasingly evident in the United States during the Trump era. This rhetoric, she says, tends not so much to dismantle institutions but to reshape them, concentrating authority in the executive and weakening checks and balances. According to Hoang, these patterns reflect a broader global shift toward more oligarchic forms of governance, where political power is increasingly concentrated among transnational elites.

"We often think of corruption as a failure of governance – that it's a weak state, and weak states can’t govern," Hoang says. "But in Southeast Asia and in other parts of East Asia, it has become an instrument for governance. It's a way of consolidating political power, weaponizing corruption."

From Vietnam's Hostess Bars to Global Finance

Hoang's research journey began in an unexpected place: working 12-hour shifts in Vietnamese hostess bars in 2009-2010, shortly after the global financial crisis. What started as an ethnographic study of the sex industry and human trafficking in Vietnam evolved into something far larger: a story of Asian ascendancy and Western decline playing out in micro-transactions.

"I started to witness local Vietnamese men turning down deals with Western businessmen and taking extraordinary deals from investors from China, parts of Southeast Asia – Hong Kong and Singapore – and Korea, Taiwan," Hoang recalls. When she examined foreign direct investment data, "the numbers lined up to what I was seeing at a micro level."

But when she presented these findings in the United States, the response was skeptical, even hostile. "People would say, 'Okay, yes, the economy is in decline, but America still has the strongest military,' or 'China is really dependent on the American economy, so if the American economy collapses, so will China's,'" she remembers. "It was a huge oversight of American arrogance to just believe that [Asian ascendancy] was impossible."

Her continued research led her to follow not just the money but "the people who move the money" – from Vietnam and Myanmar to Hong Kong and Singapore, and ultimately to offshore tax havens in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the Seychelles, and the Cayman Islands.

The Architecture of Global Capital

What Hoang uncovered was what she calls an "architecture of global capital" – an invisible financial infrastructure built by "hidden engineers" including specialized wealth managers, lawyers, and financial advisors who coordinate across borders to move elite wealth beyond the reach of any single nation-state.

The scale is staggering: approximately $7.6 trillion in household wealth is hidden offshore globally, with the top 0.01% avoiding about 25% of their tax obligations through legal structures and shell corporations.

"We have to move beyond national boundaries," Hoang argues, "because global oligarchs choose the sovereigns and choose the jurisdictions that govern their financial transactions and activities."

This system creates what Hoang describes in her book, Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press), as a web of legal and financial gray zones that allow wealth to compound while evading accountability.

Corruption as Governance Mechanism

Hoang’s work exposes the connections between the rise of global elites, corruption, and the emergence of oligarchic governance. Across both Asia and the United States, she explains, corruption discourse operates as a mechanism for reshaping democratic governance by means of dissolving the boundary between political authority and economic power.

"What does that mean? It means that we no longer rely on institutions," she says. "People who have executive authority can just go after their rivals."

This creates what Hoang calls "anticipatory compliance," a situation in which political and economic elites preemptively align themselves with power centers. The mechanism works through strategic ambiguity: when corruption charges can be selectively deployed, everyone becomes potentially vulnerable, leading to self-regulation through fear.

While this pattern is well-established in countries like China and Vietnam, Hoang sees similar dynamics emerging in the United States. "Under the Trump administration, we've seen charges of corruption being weaponized as a tool of governance," she notes, while emphasizing that elements of this already appeared under the Biden administration.

Democratic Reordering, Not Collapse

When explaining the impacts of corruption discourse on democratic governance, Hoang is careful to distinguish between democratic collapse and what she terms "democratic reordering." Rather than overtly capturing the state, global oligarchs work through existing institutions, gradually redefining their function through moralized narratives, weakened oversight, selective enforcement, and strategic risk management. The outward forms of democracy remain intact, but the independence of courts, election fairness, and accountability mechanisms are steadily eroded. "They increasingly serve concentrated elite interests."

In comparing the United States to China, Hoang notes a crucial difference: "China has a long view. They're playing a 50-year view [...] If we're in this constant [electoral] cycle, and we've delegitimized oversight and political authority, [...] we need to have stronger independent institutions that outlast whoever is in office."

Finding Hope in Resistance

Despite her sobering analysis, Hoang sees reasons for optimism. "What gives me hope is that, if you look carefully, there are a lot of resistance movements," she says. "I think there's a growing battle between the millionaires and billionaires."

She points to resistance not just from grassroots movements but from millionaires who "don't want to live in a billionaire oligarchy world, who feel economically precarious vis-à-vis the extreme inequality."

The challenge, she argues, is that both mainstream and social media highlight extremes while missing the middle-level discourse and resistance movements that are actively organizing.

Kimberly Kay Hoang is Professor of Sociology and the College, and Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago. In addition to Spiderweb Capitalism, she is the author of Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California Press). Her forthcoming work examines U.S.-China power relations in offshore financial centers.

The full APARC Briefing conversation with Hoang is available on APARC’s YouTube channel.

Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is delighted to announce today, ahead of World Press Freedom Day, that Singapore-based investigative journalist Shibani Mahtani is the recipient of the 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. The award recognizes Mahtani for her original, powerful reporting that has brought critical attention to the erosion of democracy and human rights across the region, particularly in Southeast Asia. She will receive the award at a public ceremony in the coming autumn quarter.

Until February 2026, Mahtani was an international investigative correspondent for the Washington Post. Her accountability-driven investigations across the Asia-Pacific have focused on the expanding economic and political influence of an increasingly assertive China and its implications in the region. Her work includes, among others, reports linking powerful criminal networks in Myanmar to the Chinese state and exposing brutal scam compounds in the country; examining Beijing’s influence on Chinese-language media in Singapore and its efforts to wield influence in Indonesia and elsewhere through vocational programs; scrutinizing China’s cross-national repression of Uyghur Muslims, especially in Central and Southeast Asia; and investigating how its promise of prosperity brought Laos debt and distress.

Mahtani joined the Washington Post in 2018 as the Southeast Asia and Hong Kong Bureau Chief. She reported extensively from Myanmar, the Philippines, Laos, and other parts of the region. Most notably, she chronicled China’s subjugation of Hong Kong, from the explosive protests in 2019, triggered by Beijing’s proposal to extradite locals to the mainland, through the systematic crushing of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, to the dismantling of the city’s autonomy and the many ways it is changing.

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Her searing coverage of Hong Kong’s struggle includes a multimedia investigative report into Hong Kong police misconduct during the 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations, for which she earned a Human Rights Press Award, and an exclusive on the alleged torture of a key prosecution witness in Hong Kong’s highest-profile trial of pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai. Mahtani continued to pursue that story, most recently reporting on Lai’s 20-year prison sentence, even after losing her job when the Washington Post sharply reduced its International team as part of mass layoffs.

Mahtani is also the co-author of the 2023 book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy, a narrative history of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement that explores it through the eyes of people on the ground, culminating in the 2019 mass protests and Beijing’s crackdown. 

Before joining the Washington Post, she was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and reported from Singapore, Myanmar, and Chicago.

“Shibani Mahtani’s journalism is defined by a courageous and relentless pursuit of speaking truth to power,” said APARC Director Kiyoteru Tsutsui. “Her work exemplifies the vital role of investigative reporting: to expose complex systems of repression and give voice to those who have been silenced. We are proud to honor her outstanding journalism with the Shorenstein Award.”

Sponsored and presented annually by APARC, the Shorenstein Award recognizes journalists and news media outlets that leverage a deep knowledge of Asian societies to share crucial insights with a global audience. The award carries a $10,000 cash prize and honors the legacy of APARC’s benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. It also demonstrates APARC’s commitment to journalism that persistently and courageously seeks accuracy, deep reporting, and nuanced coverage in an age when attacks are regularly launched against independent news media, fact-based truth, and those who tell it.

The selection committee for the award praised Mahtani’s investigations as groundbreaking and revelatory, noting that, in her coverage of Hong Kong, she has broken stories others would not – or could not – report.

The committee members are William Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy; Anna Fifield, a journalist and foreign affairs analyst, non-resident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and recipient of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award; James Hamilton, vice provost for undergraduate education, the Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program, Stanford University; Louisa Lim, associate professor, Audio-Visual Journalism Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne; and Raju Narisetti, partner and global leader at McKinsey Global Publishing, McKinsey & Company.

Twenty-four winners previously received the Shorenstein Award. Recent honorees include Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for the New York Times; Emily Feng, international correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan, and more; Netra News, Bangladesh's premier independent media outlet; The Caravan, India's premier magazine of long-form journalism; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler.

Information about the 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award ceremony celebrating Mahtahni will be forthcoming in the autumn quarter.

This commentary first appeared in The Diplomat magazine.

In March 2025, one of the authors vividly observed hundreds of thousands of people filling downtown Seoul over President Yoon Suk-yeol’s impeachment. Reminiscent of the “candlelight protests” of 2017 but with greater intensity, these rallies began after the short-lived martial law declaration of last December, with some demanding Yoon’s immediate removal from office and others denouncing it as illegitimate. Even after the Constitutional Court’s unanimous decision to impeach him on April 4, rival protests continued through the June 3 snap elections.

Such rallies were hardly unprecedented in South Korea, given its rich history of civic engagement in politics. However, in the context of Yoon’s martial law declaration and subsequent impeachment, the protests illustrated a fragile democracy divided against itself. In fact, Yoon had justified his action as a necessary measure to remove “anti-state forces” in the face of the intensifying political fight with opposition forces, which controlled South Korea’s legislature throughout Yoon’s presidency.

Public opinion polls and election outcomes show how deeply divided the nation has been. A 2022 Pew survey found that 83 percent of South Koreans believed there were strong partisan conflicts, the highest among all 19 countries surveyed. Recent election results reflected such societal and political division. Yoon’s razor-thin 2022 victory over Lee Jae-myung and Lee’s narrow win in the 2025 snap election revealed a nation split down the middle.

In addition, mass protests, largely associated with progressives, have become common for conservatives too and spilled from plazas to online platforms. Politics has turned into “culture wars” and competing claims to be representative of “the people,” provoking moral charges and emotional responses. Polarization now cuts across gender and generational lines beyond political and ideological divisions of the past, standing alongside illiberalism and populism as a core threat to Korean democracy.

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Following his keynote remarks, Khalil joined a panel discussion with William Dobson, the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and a veteran in international reporting, and Elora Shehabuddin, a professor of gender and women's studies and the director of the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley. James Hamilton, Stanford University’s vice provost for undergraduate education, the Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Journalism Program, chaired the discussion. Both Dobson and Hamilton also serve on the judging committee for the Shorenstein Award.

The Shorenstein Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists and news outlets whose work has deepened the understanding of Asia while advancing the values of a free press.
 

Bearing Witness 

Khalil opened his remarks by sharing a photograph of himself listening to a Bangladeshi woman whose son had been abducted by the Rapid Action Battalion, the country’s elite counterterrorism force that has been accused of serious human rights violations and abuse of power. For Khalil, the image encapsulates the animating question at the heart of Netra News: What does it truly mean to comfort the afflicted?

Investigative journalists, he argued, are first and foremost witnesses. Their work requires listening and documenting, for as long as it takes. He described an investigation that started with a phone call from a day laborer in Malaysia, who recounted his experience being abducted in Dhaka and held in a secret site by a plainclothed squad. Khalil kept calling back with questions, continuing the conversation over months. The source shared precise recollections that helped Netra News map a clandestine detention facility in the heart of the Bangladeshi capital. The investigation, "Secret Prisoners of Dhaka," published in 2023, shed light on hidden abuses and was shortlisted for the Global Shining Light Award for investigative journalism in developing countries. 

Khalil described other Netra News investigations that have sought to expose high-level crimes. “Body Count” combined data journalism and fieldwork to analyze more than a decade of alleged extrajudicial killings and acts of torture by Bangladeshi security forces. The patterns revealed which agencies were involved, geographic concentration, and spikes in killings during election cycles, all underscoring a systematic practice. For this work, the newsroom won a 2024 Sigma Award for Data Journalism.

Bearing witness, Khalil noted, means that public interest journalism must listen not only to the afflicted, but also to the perpetrators of horrible crimes. In another project, collaborating with German TV broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Netra News interviewed former Rapid Action Battalion commanders on camera about how extrajudicial killings were carried out. The investigation, "Inside the Death Squad," was the first to provide evidence of targeted killings and torture by the RAB, and was recognized with a 2024 Human Rights Press Award for documentary video.

Another joint investigation with DW exposed a pattern of deploying RAB members implicated in torture and killings to serve as United Nations peacekeepers. The revelations were cited by governments and lawmakers, and intensified scrutiny of peacekeeping vetting practices. 

“This is accountability journalism at its purest: reporting that not only informs, but also confronts power and demands justice, said Hamilton in his remarks before the award presentation.

Khalil situated this kind of reportage within a normative framework of journalism that defends democracy and human rights, for which he outlined four roles: monitorial (watching and warning), facilitative (bringing opposing segments of society together), radical (challenging institutions in the name of rights and freedoms), and collaborative (engaging with power when appropriate). First and foremost, this kind of journalism serves the public interest.

An Experiment in Exile

Those commitments guided Netra News from its inception. Khalii established the outlet in 2019 in Sweden, where he had lived in exile since 2008, seeking refuge following his detention and torture by the Bangladeshi military intelligence agency. As he set up the newsroom in exile with colleagues, he made a deliberate choice: rather than defending democratic norms from afar, they would “cover Bangladesh as if it were a democracy, like Sweden or the United States, and report accordingly.”

That meant reporting with no self-censorship or fear. Due to security risks to staff in-country, Netra News adopted the discipline of an intelligence operation, eschewing daily news coverage and opinions to concentrate instead on meticulously vetted investigations. With its reporters distributed across multiple countries and some working undercover in Bangladesh, the newsroom combined offshore editorial independence with on-the-ground reporting, publishing its investigations in both Bangla and English. This approach uniquely positioned the newsroom to cover the July 2024 uprising in Bangladesh with uncommon access.

Now, a year after mass protests toppled Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian regime, and 18 years after he fled the country, Khalil has returned to open a Netra News bureau in Dhaka. Receiving the Shorenstein Journalism Award on behalf of the outlet at this moment, he said, is both recognition of its impact since its founding and a signal of support to the next generation of journalists carrying its mission forward.
 

Youth-Led Uprising in Context

During the discussion that followed Khalil’s keynote, the panelists considered the prospects for democracy in Bangladesh, the economics of investigative reporting, and the dynamics of youth-led protests in Asia.

Asked how the media landscape in Bangladesh had shifted since the 2024 uprising, Khalil said the media’s muscle memory remains one of censorship and fear. The challenge now is to “unlearn stenography,” that is, the practice of reporting only what those in power say, and build habits of dispassionate public interest journalism that scrutinizes both state and non-state power. That includes the interim government, corporate interests, and majoritarian religious forces.

Investigative journalism is a tough business to monetize and sustain. Khalil explained that Netra News is a nonprofit and that grant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy has made it possible. Long-term independence, however, will require earning monetary support from the people it serves. “The ultimate test is asking the public, ‘Will you pay for this?’”

Turning to Gen Z protest movements that have swept across South Asia, Dobson noted a wave of digitally savvy youth mobilizations pressing entrenched elites for substantive change. “People want real change, not shuffling the same roster of political players.” The youth-led uprisings that swept through Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and, more recently, Nepal, explained Dobson, had not originally set out to topple the established regimes, but to fight deepening inequality and economic disparities. The agendas changed, however, due to the lack of responsiveness from political institutions that have been hollowed out by patronage and corruption.

Shehabuddin underscored the central role women activists played in Bangladesh’s 2024 protests, leading from the front to help topple the authoritarian government, only to find themselves largely absent from decision-making led by the interim government.

The event concluded with questions from the audience about journalism in transitional contexts and under strain amid democratic backsliding. Newsrooms should aim to serve the entirety of society, said Khalil, alluding to the fragmented media landscape in the United States. As for standing up to anti-democratic power, he returned to first principles: the media’s charge is to bear witness, especially when those in power disapprove.

As the U.S.-China competition unfolds in areas ranging from trade to technology to the military, the rival-making discourse surrounding this great power competition was the focus of the conference Beyond a New Cold War, organized and hosted by the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL).

Held on August 14, 2025, the event showcased SNAPL research illuminating how U.S. political leaders and the media shape narratives concerning China and how citizens in young democracies perceive these narratives. Serving as discussants were experts from Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Hoover Institution (represented by a former National Security Affairs Fellow), and the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

The studies presented and discussed at the conference are part of SNAPL’s U.S.-Asia Relations research track, one of four research streams the lab pursues. Housed at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and founded by sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, the lab aims to generate evidence-based policy recommendations and promote transnational collaboration with academic and policy institutions to advance the future prosperity of Asia and U.S.-Asia relations.

“This conference provided an excellent opportunity to engage the policy community with our research findings,” says Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the director of APARC and the Korea Program. “The lab will continue to foster ongoing dialogue between academic and policy circles.” 

The conference builds on previous SNAPL forums and meetings with policy and academic communities in Washington, D.C., held in September 2024. These policy engagement activities are made possible thanks to a grant from FSI. 

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Dynamics of American Elite Discourse on China

At the first conference panel, Research Fellow Xinru Ma shared a study that unravels who leads elite discourse on U.S.-China relations – whether Congress, the White House, or the media. While prior research suggests that each of these actors could have distinct agenda-setting capacities, their relative influence and its directionality in foreign policy discourse remain empirically underexamined.

The study addresses this question by investigating China-focused discourse and framing by the U.S. legislative and executive branches as well as the media. Using computational and causal inference methods, the study analyzes social media data from the legislative and executive branches alongside major U.S. media outlets across two periods: the 116th Congress (January 3, 2019 – January 3, 2021) and the 118th Congress (January 3, 2023 – January 3, 2025).

The analysis reveals that, both in terms of issue attention and framing, the media tends to follow the lead of Congress and the President. The findings also indicate that Republican lawmakers exert greater influence on setting the China agenda in the media. In contrast, Democratic lawmakers are stronger predictors of how the media frames the issues at stake. Moreover, the findings suggest that presidential influence on China discourse weakened sharply in the 118th Congress, and that there is an overall shift toward party-driven, rather than institutionally mediated, communication among elites. 

Policy Implications
 

• Media Weakness: The reliance of media outlets on partisan cues from political elites on foreign policy issues increases the risk of incomplete or skewed public understanding of China and U.S.-China relations. The risk is especially disconcerting as U.S. reporters face limited access to China.
• Partisan Echo Chambers: Communication flows primarily within partisan networks rather than across institutions, with the separation of powers becoming less effective as a system of checks and balances. The splintering of political discourse into parallel echo chambers risks eroding opportunities for cross-party dialogue and democratic deliberation on complex foreign policy issues.
• Fragmented Messaging: Divergent partisan messaging on China signals inconsistency to both domestic and international audiences who might draw contradictory conclusions about U.S. intentions. This dynamic gives rise to strategic miscalculations abroad and a fragmented public understanding of China policy at home.
• Declining  Institutional Voices: The decline of institutional power over shaping U.S. discourse on China has created a growing vulnerability. As individual political figures gain sway, personalized narratives often prioritize short-term visibility over a coherent, long-term strategy.

Democracy vs. Autocracy: A View from Young Democracies

Despite their deep divisions on most issues, there is one topic Republicans and Democrats converge on: China. Both parties increasingly frame the intensifying U.S.-China tensions as a strategic competition between democracy and autocracy. But is the value diplomacy this approach begets effective in promoting liberal values in young democracies?

At the second conference panel, Visiting Scholar Gidong Kim presented a study that addresses this question. “This study challenges the effectiveness of the value-laden U.S. diplomacy in young democracies and presents a more nuanced explanation of democracy's role in forming public opinion on foreign policy,” says Kim, formerly a postdoctoral fellow with SNAPL and currently an assistant professor of political science at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS).

The study hypothesizes that in young democracies, where democratic histories are relatively short and legacies of authoritarian rule endure, citizens tend to understand democracy in terms of electoral institutions rather than liberal values. Similarly, in the context of the U.S.-China competition, citizens in these countries tend to perceive China’s threats to electoral institutions more seriously than its threats to liberal values.

To test this proposition, the study uses a country-level, cross-national analysis and an original survey experiment in South Korea. The findings support the hypothesis.

Policy Implications
 

• Context Matters: U.S. policymakers must acknowledge the limits of value-driven diplomacy. Washington should diversify its foreign policy toolkit and adapt it to regional contexts: in Western Europe, liberal values rhetoric can reinforce alliances, but in young democracies, the design and strength of electoral institutions carry greater weight.
• A Crisis of Credibility: For China, there is an equally clear lesson about the need to rethink its approach to diplomacy. Without addressing suspicions of election interference in democratic countries, Beijing will struggle to gain traction with the publics in young Asian democracies and dissipate anti-China sentiments in those countries, even if it increases its soft power through liberalization policies.

SNAPL’s studies presented at the conference underscore the crucial role that narratives and public perceptions play in international relations. They suggest that great power competition is not just about power. Rather, it is also about persuasion, which, in turn, depends on how different audiences — at home and abroad — perceive the story.