The Fight Against Corruption in East Asia – Corporate Governance and Corporate Crime

The paper will focus on prominent cases of corruption in East Asian countries and the new laws to fight against corruption. For South Korea and Japan, it is concentrated on corruption cases such as Toshiba, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KNHP) and the Hyundai scandals. Public officers of KNHP took bribes from subcontractors for various illegal favors. We will question how the individuals’ behavior is interconnected with the patterns of organizational deviance, and how corporate crime is controlled by laws and the corporate governance systems. Concerning China, the article will ask how the anti-corruption purge of President Xi Jinping is dealing with corporate crime and new forms of corporate regulations. Are these new regulations leading in a comparative perspective to good governance in moral terms and to a higher resistance concerning corruption in East Asia?