The implementation of “one country two systems” in Hong Kong has usually been boiled down to one question: can the various institutional arrangements set up by the British before 1997, which are widely seen by Hong Kong people as pillars of Hong Kong's success, be preserved after the handover of sovereignty by Britain to China? Alongside the widely recognized legal system, civil service management system, free market economy, banking and finance system, the anti-corruption agency, namely the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), is surely an important institutional arrangement that Hong Kong people hope to preserve. In this connection, Ian Scott and Ting Gong's book has provided us with a comprehensive account of the evolution of the ICAC and its success factors over the decades.
The main body of the book consists of 11 chapters aiming to present Hong Kong as a leading (but rare) successful case amongst more than 150 anti-corruption agencies worldwide. Chapter one provides a theoretical framework for the whole book by introducing the definitions of corruptions, corruption prevention systems and anti-corruption agencies. Chapters two and three offer a comprehensive background of the case of Hong Kong, including the corruption problems of the territory from 1842 to 1973 and the early years of the ICAC following its establishment in 1974. Chapters four to eight examine the various “success factors” that underpin the ICAC's experiences as an anti-corruption agency, including political will, organization, anti-corruption law, public support and a cycle of virtue. Chapters nine and ten discuss how the ICAC as a successful anti-corruption agency has contributed to good governance in Hong Kong and also the bad governance experiences where the work of ICAC has been restricted by the constitutional and political order. The final chapter concludes the case of the ICAC in the context of anti-corruption literature and discusses its lessons for other anti-corruption agencies.
The major contribution of the book is certainly its efforts to connect the experiences of Hong Kong with the wider anti-corruption literature. It successfully draws on this academic literature to point out the necessary conditions for success of anti-corruption agencies and then develops a clear analytical framework to analyse the experiences of the ICAC. To make a contribution to the literature and reach a wider academic audience is the common challenge facing all Hong Kong studies scholars, namely how to theorize their Hong Kong-centric research findings. Ian Scott and Ting Gong's book has definitely passed this important threshold.
As a comparative democratization researcher, the major puzzle that I face after reading this book is how should we interpret the experiences of the ICAC in Hong Kong in the wider context of democratization? An anti-corruption agency, as an important public administration or governance institution, is surely not immune from the wider political regime. From this perspective, how have Hong Kong's democratization trajectories (for which, see my 2017 article “In-between liberal authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism: Hong Kong's democratization under Chinese sovereignty, 1997–2016” Democratization, 24(4), 724–750) structured the evolution of the ICAC? Did the democratizing environment of Hong Kong from the 1970s to 1997, including the expansion of constitutional liberalization and electoral popularization, contribute to the various so-called “success factors” of the ICAC? Does the growing trend of electoral authoritarian-style manipulations in post-1997 Hong Kong undermine the “success factors” of the ICAC and contribute to its various controversies in recent years (such as the cases of Timothy Tong and Leung Chun-ying)? More broadly speaking, how should we compare the experience of Hong Kong's anti-corruption agency with those of other East Asian hybrid regimes (such as Singapore) and new democracies (such as Taiwan and Korea)? These questions are certainly beyond the scope of Ian Scott and Ting Gong's book, but they are the essential questions that future scholars should address in the upcoming studies on Hong Kong's ICAC.
All in all, Ian Scott and Ting Gong have done a valuable job in highlighting the theoretical importance of researching Hong Kong's ICAC in the context of anti-corruption literature. It provides a concise account of ICAC's evolution from British colonial times to the Chinese SAR period. It is an essential reading for all scholars and researchers with an interest in China studies, Hong Kong studies and anti-corruption studies.
