Anthony B. L. Cheung

Global aspirations and strategising for world-class status: New form of politics in higher education governance in Hong Kong

In the era of globalisation, competition has also become global. In higher education, countries worldwide are attaching increasing importance to international ranking exercises and subscribing to the ‘world-class universities’ paradigm, complemented by various strategies to benchmark with leading universities in order to enhance the global competitiveness of their universities. This is particularly so in Asia as it emerges as the centre of fast-growing economies of the world. Against this wider global policy backdrop, this article reviews major policies introduced and strategies employed by the government and universities/higher education institutions of Hong Kong in the quest for world-class status. It critically examines the ‘politics of competition’ among institutions for both state and non-state resources, in recruiting and retaining global talent, and in internationalising their curricula in order to achieve their global aspirations. It also explores the intra-institutional ‘politics’ within institutions involving tensions between teaching and research, and among different discipline areas.

New Interventionism in the Making: Interpreting state interventions in Hong Kong after the change of sovereignty

After the change of sovereignty in Hong Kong in July 1997, there has been much speculation as to whether the new administration of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa would bring about a more interventionist government, given his campaign rhetoric to adopt a strong leadership and his well-known admiration of the Singapore model of development. This article examines the evolution of the Hong Kong ‘state’ within an historical perspective and argues that by the eve of the handover the former colonial government was already an active state driven by highly conscious accumulation and legitimation strategies in response to the rising social, economic and political demands of the 1980s and 1990s. New factors emerging after the handover have further strengthened the forces of state intervention, including the decolonization syndrome, institutionalized corporatism under the Basic Law political design, the need to gain legitimacy and to seek performance by the Tung administration because of the lack of proper electoral mandate, and the impact of serious external crisis arising from the Asian financial crisis inducing rethinking of policies. Whereas the old colonial interventionism was endogenously driven by bureaucratic reformism, the new interventionism is clearly more subject to exogenous forces embedded in the changing institutional, political and economic conditions.

Public sector reform and the re‐legitimation of public bureaucratic power

Argues that from the 1980s onwards, the Hong Kong Government has initiated a series of reforms within the civil service which eventually have been subsumed within a programme of public sector reform. The key features of these reforms are not dissimilar from the style of reform espoused within “new public management” (NPM) ideology. Argues that, despite attempts to adopt NPM ideology with regard to public sector reform, Hong Kong’s reforms do not share the same institutional reform logic as those of NPM. Suggests a political discourse of NPM‐based public sector reform which places the re‐legitimation of bureaucratic power as the key to understanding the reform process.

Health Policy Reform

This is the recent World Bank report on financing healthcare in China. If such a worry, expressed by the normally pro-free-market World Bank, is to be taken seriously, then the prospects for China’s healthcare system are very much called into question.

Hong Kong's Post-1997 Institutional Crisis: Problems of Governance and Institutional Incompatibility

The protest by over half a million people on July 1, 2003, unleashed the most serious crisis of governance in Hong Kong since its retrocession to China in 1997. Triggered by the governments attempt to legislate new national security legislation, it exposed more fundamental institutional defects of an increasingly weakened government. This article puts forward two arguments. First, the political logic of the pre-1997 period was not compatible with the post-1997 political environment and public sentiment, resulting in a widening cognitive gap between government and people. Second, the former colonial administration, despite its non-democratic nature, was able to secure sufficient public acquiescence and acceptance through economic performance and service delivery. The new government was constrained by both economic and fiscal difficulties and unexpected social crises. A declining capacity to perform effectively had further eroded public support. Attempted reforms of the bureaucracy and the introduction of a new ministerial system had caused greater political-administrative disjunction and actually compounded the crisis of governance.

Performance pledges–power to the consumer or a quagmire in public service legitimation?

One of the latest initiatives in Hong Kongs public sector reform is the launch of “performance pledges” in 1992, which have essentially been modelled on citizens charters in the United Kingdom. While the stated aims of performance pledges, citizens charters, or similar initiatives, are to raise the standard of public services and to make such services answer better to the needs of ordinary people, hence “empowering” the public service consumers, this latest consumerist trend in public management has more far-reaching implications, both in terms of the organization as well as the legitimation of public service provision. This article examines such implications, with specific reference to the Hong Kong situation, and argues that the outcome of the development seems to point to the empowerment of public managers rather than the consumers as the official rhetoric would imply.

The story of two administrative states: state capacity in Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract Hong Kong and Singapore are both typical administrative states with an efficient administration and a vibrant market, which had achieved rapid economic growth in the past decades. This article examines the trajectory of their state capacity, highlighting recent problems and challenges. Based on a conceptual framework that captures and links up four dimensions – namely polity, bureaucracy, economy and civil society – their commonalities and differences in response are discussed. Their experience should be of particular relevance to transitional authoritarian states in Asia such as China, which faces similar challenges to reform in the arenas of politics, administration, economics and society.

Public administration in East Asia: legacies, trajectories and lessons

Public administration and public management, as a field of study, has always been informed by the practice of governance and public administration in the Western world, especially the Anglo-American family of countries. In recent years, there have been more comparative studies of administrative and governance reforms (e.g OECD, 1995; Pollitt and Bouchaert, 2000), though such studies are mostly construed within the context of global reform movements and paradigms originating from the Western developed nations. Globalization should not be a one-way street; it should be a process of recognizing cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-institutional experiences, from the East as much as from the West, from the South as much as from the North, and from the developing world as much as from the developed. Writing from East Asia, the authors in this special issue consider it long overdue that the Asian public administration experience should be more systematically understood, conceptualized and presented in the international literature. East Asian public administration reforms represent efforts at continuity and change – both connected to past traditions and domestic administrative and political trajectories, as well as linking up to the current global movement of administrative reform, displaying features of ‘Asian-ness’, which can be distinguished from the hitherto mostly Euro-American dominated paradigms of public administration.

Executive-Led Governance or Executive Power ‘Hollowed-Out’—The Political Quagmire of Hong Kong

Abstract The Chief Executive of Hong Kong has inherited from the former British colonial governor wide-ranging constitutional powers as built into the Basic Law. Such powers are expected to facilitate an executive-led government. However, this article argues that since the handover in 1997, there had been a steady process of hollowing-out of executive power under the rule of former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, resulting from growing political challenges, policy failure, and internal fissures, which pushed the administrative state to the brink of a ‘disabled state’. His successor faced the daunting task of rebuilding a new form of governance based on reconnection between political institutions and sectoral and civil society interests. So far, the political quagmire has remained.

The rise of privatization policies: similar faces, diverse motives

Since the 1980s privatization has become a popular policy of an increasing number of developed and developing countries. This article reviews some of the literature on privatization and policy change and seeks to explore the range of contexts within which privatization policies emerged in contemporary government. It is suggested that privatization policies are not simply an end-product of economic prescriptions, but should rather be seen as a result of an interaction of exogenous and endogenous factors, some structural and others more actor-induced. These include economic and fiscal crises, crisis of the dominant policy consensus, the emergence of a new ideological hegemony, intentions of political leaders, bureaucratic self-interest, and to some extent, client politics and international influence. What appears as similarity in privatization policy may have hidden significantly diverse policy motives.