1、CORRUPTION BY DESIGN: BUILDING CLEAN GOVERNMENT IN MAINLAND CHINA AND HONG KONG 作者： Melanie Manion 国籍： USA 出处： Information Age Publis
2、hing Writing a book that focuses on how to build clean government in China requires both braveness and brightness. China is culturally clientelist and has recently been enjoying an economic boom due to its policy adjustment from a socialist-planned economy to a kind of semi-capitalist market one, bu
3、t still under a Leninist party rule. All these make even the concept of corruption in China complicated and even more so any attempt to remedy the so-called "corruption" problem. Professor Melanie Manion, however, may just set a good example for doing so by her book Corruption by Design: B
4、uilding Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong. As the book title has shown, Manion's braveness is demonstrated not only by her tackling China's corruption problems, but also by her attempt to find solutions for healing the wound. Moreover, the solutions she suggests in the b
5、ook are mainly derived from the experience of Hong Kong, which may cause doubts both from academics and the Chinese central government for its comparability with the Mainland China (apple and orange? master and subject?). Hong Kong and Mainland China may not be viewed as comparable by some orthodox
6、methodological paradigm, but Manion succeeds in comparing the two by a method not written in textbooks regarding comparative politics. Manion dares to do something beyond paradigmatic constraints and her success is evidence of her wisdom. Manion makes at least four good choices in writing this
7、 book. First is her choice of the book title: Corruption by Design, rather than Clean Government by Design. Actually, from the concluding Chapter Six on "Institutional Design for Clean Government," one may easily get an impression that the author's main purpose of the book is to recomm
8、end alternative institutional designs, drawn from the successful experience of Hong Kong's transformation, for building clean government in a widely corrupt environment. It is quite like the two sides of a coin, as the author argues: "Corruption by design summarizes a view that some institu
9、tional designs promote clean government, while others generate and sustain corruption." Manion lays out the key institutions for transforming corruption, namely anticorruption agencies, incentives structures, and constitutional design, and she describes the proper designs for clean government e
10、mbodied in each of the three institutions. By implication the opposite designs of these, currently found in the case of China, both produce and nurture corruption. Thus Manion could have titled the book "Clean Government by Design," which would have sounded more positive and constructive.
11、 I thought about this quite a while, and eventually came to appreciate Manion's choice. Some have suggested that corruption is either culturally bound or a desirable concomitant of modernization, so that it is not necessarily remediable or that remedying it is not necessary.1 According to t
12、his argument, corruption in certain contexts that are undergoing the process of modernization plays a role in softening the rigidity of bureaucratic regulations by injecting the rigors of competition, and that can help restore the political economy to Pareto optimality (Mishra 2005； Lamlsdorff 2007)
13、. No matter how much this cultural or political-economic analysis of corruption may be able to shed some light into our understanding of the so-called corruption phenomena in developing countries, it may, unintentionally, legitimize the corrupt situation and render excuses for the government and lea
14、ders in these countries not to launch effective reform on corruption. But when Manion points out that corruption is also designed, this manifests that a cultural predilection for the occurrence of corruption is a myth, and economically induced corruption can be uprooted by closely examining relevant
15、 policies and institutions. Governments or political leaders have no excuses to avoid facing the problems and offering effective strategies to deal with them. Corruption by design thus conveys the sense that corruption is an intended consequence, and not uncontrollable. Secondly, Manion choose
16、s to adopt a previously set definition of corruption: "the abuse of public office for private gain in violation of rules." She explicitly admits the plausible flaws inherent in this formal-legal standard approach to the concept. A formal-legal based definition of corruption might be a nece
17、ssary pick for a comparative study of China and Hong Kong, especially one aimed at problem-solving. Moreover, in adopting this definition, Manion is able to save her energy and most of her pages for the main focus of the book-illuminating the two cases, comparing the differences in the two, and reco
18、mmending successful designs. Given the fact that corruption has never been absent from human history and has been subject to examination by numerous studies, Manion uses a manner that is like a sharp knife cutting into chaotic flax so as to get right to the point and cause no challenges. The t
19、hird good choice she makes is the way that Manion sells her ideas and story. She uses game theory to portray the possibility of shifting from a frequency-dependent equilibrium with widespread corrupt transactions to one with many fewer. The utilization of this game-theoretic scheme to illustrate why
20、 the occurrence of corruption is context-bound is by no means a new one. The novelty lies in how one treats the question of how the shift can occur, how the old expected payoffs curve can be moved to a new one that discourages corrupt transactions. Manion assigns government the role to break through
21、 the old vicious cycle so as to lower the corrupt payoffs curve. This assignment is not above doubt. Theoretically speaking, changing an existing payoffs curve usually demands the force of the so-called exogenous variable. Can a government be exogenous to its own widely corrupt environment? In
22、 the case of Hong Kong, the British colonial government may qualify as exogenous. In the case of China, it is less clear how the Chinese government can serve as an exogenous force to intervene in its widespread corruption that, as the author has cited, is supported by both survey data and official r
23、ecords. Manion solves this dilemma by according sincerity to Chinese leaders' in their endeavor to launch anticorruption reform. Furthermore, she also confirms that China is a strong state capable of "engineering major transformation and implementing difficult policies." Finally, she d
24、raws out a stick derived from a rational calculation approach, by pointing out that Chinese government would gradually lose their governing legitimacy if they let corruption continuously grow. Although I am not fully convinced by what she says about the sincerity of Chinese leaders in anticorruption
25、, I find no other good alternatives for building clean government in a widely corrupt environment. Finding the key actors, moreover, is not the main purpose of the book. The main concern, instead, is how to change institutional designs that sustain corruption to ones that induce clean transaction. Manion's suggestions, based upon Hong Kong's experience, involve a highly authorized and independent anticorruption agency (The Independent Commission Against Corruption, or ICAC), properly redesigned incentive structures, and a fundamental change in
