Corruption by design : building clean government in mainland China and Hong Kong / Melanie Manion.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Manion, Melanie, 1955-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political corruption--China--Prevention.

Political corruption.

Political corruption--China--Hong Kong--Prevention.

Political corruption--Prevention--Case studies.

Political corruption--China.

Political corruption--China--Hong Kong.

Political corruption--Case studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (296 p.)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book contrasts experiences of mainland China and Hong Kong to explore the pressing question of how governments can transform a culture of widespread corruption to one of clean government. Melanie Manion examines Hong Kong as the best example of the possibility of reform. Within a few years it achieved a spectacularly successful conversion to clean government. Mainland China illustrates the difficulty of reform. Despite more than two decades of anticorruption reform, corruption in China continues to spread essentially unabated. The book argues that where corruption is already commonplace, the context in which officials and ordinary citizens make choices to transact corruptly (or not) is crucially different from that in which corrupt practices are uncommon. A central feature of this difference is the role of beliefs about the prevalence of corruption and the reliability of government as an enforcer of rules ostensibly constraining official venality. Anticorruption reform in a setting of widespread corruption is a problem not only of reducing corrupt payoffs, but also of changing broadly shared expectations of venality. The book explores differences in institutional design choices about anticorruption agencies, appropriate incentive structures, and underlying constitutional designs that contribute to the disparate outcomes in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Anticorruption Reform in a Setting ofWidespread Corruption

2 Corruption and Anticorruption Reform in Hong Kong

3 An Explosion of Corruption in Mainland China

4 Problems of Routine Anticorruption Enforcement

5 Anticorruption Campaigns as Enforcement Mechanisms

6 Institutional Designs for Clean Government

Notes

Works Cited

Author Index

Subject Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674040519

0674040511

OCLC:

607113719