Peng Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption and Extralegal Protection (2017). His research interests include organized crime, illegal markets, corruption, economic sociology, bureaucracy, and governance. Wanlin Lin is Associate Professor at the School of Law, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Her current research applies institutional economics, law and economics, and game theory to study informal property rights, illegal markets, knowledge governance in China, and interactions between formal and informal institutions.

• List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Developing a socio-economic approach for analyzing the social order of illegal markets; 3. Unmasking China's illegal markets: research design and fieldwork; 4. Unlicensed street vending; 5. small-property-right housing market; 6. Corrupt transactions; 7. The illegal online lending market; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography.