Why Hong Kong’s culture of corruption is alive and well, and extremely difficult to prove
- Graft is entrenched in Hong Kong society; just the face has changed from low-level bribery to high-level venality
- However, this is virtually impossible to uncover
Official corruption and public complacency towards it have a long and dishonourable history in Hong Kong. From the British colony’s mid-19th-century beginnings, tales of graft, peculation and associated scandals have been commonplace.
Venality was hard-wired into Hong Kong’s DNA; the colony was “that kind of place” and either attracted, or swiftly created, “those sorts of people”. Nothing much has changed over time.
Culture has played a key role. Throughout Chinese history, local officials were assumed to be on the take – why else would they enter the onerous arena of public life? Only when “perquisites” turned into outright extortion, and administrative efficiency was compromised, did the public seriously object to graft. When this happened, some semblance of official probity was swiftly mandated from above, lest social unrest tip over into outright rebellion and thus threaten the “mandate of heaven”. Chinese history amply illustrates this observation.
Hong Kong’s current anti-corruption statutes were largely designed for last century’s peculations. After the Independent Commission Against Corruption was established, in 1974, policemen who wanted to line their pockets before retirement overseas, or officials charged with issuing hawker permits, building licences or some other essential piece of bureaucratic paperwork, were targets for anti-graft investigators in a short-term approach to combating rake-offs.
Most such crimes reflected the nature of Hong Kong society as it then was (“make it fast, make it now, cash in your chips and clear out”) and involved the sort of officials who were susceptible to tips, bribes and various forms of “squeeze”. These were often poorly paid functionaries who supplemented inadequate salaries with under-the-table payments.
Discretion depended on their ability to deliver the promised results; throughout the ages, corruption has been notoriously difficult to detect when buyers and sellers have been willing, and prices and outcomes mutually agreeable.
Since the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, top-level prosecutions for graft and misconduct in public office – one chief executive and one chief secretary have done prison time for venality – are widely believed to be the tip of the iceberg. Scams – usually involving illegal construction work – which have eventually led to the hapless husbands and wives of senior officials carrying the legal can, have further deepened public cynicism. And these days, the old joke about the ICAC acronym – “I Can’t Accept Cash” – rings a little hollow when anecdotal evidence suggests certain prosecutions are not pursued in favour of broader political considerations. Equally hard to prove is the questionable award of contracts to opaque companies with, shall we say, curious political connections.
When inside knowledge of extensive public works projects that will come to fruition a decade or two after inception is involved, long-term corruption opportunities present themselves. Retirement jobs, often outside Hong Kong – which makes connections harder to establish – are one difficult-to-substantiate reward. Children, and even grandchildren, of officials who made discretionary decisions, who now have “iron rice bowl” occupations within the local business conglomerate that apparently benefited, are the subject of well-informed local discussion.
But with no brown envelope having been deposited in anyone’s desk drawer one Friday afternoon, official corruption – as currently defined – is virtually impossible to prosecute, because it is extremely difficult to prove.
To judge by current trends, future academic historians of Hong Kong are likely to conclude that, from the mid-1970s until around the early years of this century, the territory was a place where general official probity prevailed, relative to the grubby, grabby, venal periods before and subsequently.
