Hong Kong is often held up as an example on how modern cities should fight corruption. Its anti-corruption agency, ICAC, is hailed as among the world's best having almost completely purged systemic corruption within a decade of its inception. Its successes continue today as corruption remains very low in the city and, by extension, it is assumed that the same is true for white-collar crime. However, there have been few analytical studies by criminologists on white-collar crime in the city.
This book centres its analysis on Hong Kong as a quintessentially industrious East Asian society - where Confucian values are mixed with capitalistic motivations - to identify patterns of abuse. It explains how Hong Kong maintains the myth of a clean city and examines the prevalence of white-collar crime in the city's property sector. It argues that cultural factors, especially the social organising characteristic of collectivism, exaggerates the capitalistic inclinations of society to hide abuses and discourage the challenging of authority. Yujing Fun points to the failure of Asian criminology to consider white-collar crime as a stagnation of method and theory, and recommends that the scope of methodological investigation be opened up to move the discipline forward.
