Institute of Education Library
For private study or research only. Not for publication or further reproduction.
1
governance system. Old wine was put into new bottle. The political order as enshrined in Hong Kong's Basic Law was largely a continuation (or at most a re-institutionalization) of the ancien regime. Since 1997, the Hong Kong SAR has been suffering from one legitimacy crisis after another. The infallibility of the administrative state, long held responsible for Hong Kong's success story in the final decades of British colonial rule, has by now been largely eroded. The failure of governance can be diagnosed with respect to systemic defects, decline of state capacity, and the crisis of social cohesion and shared vision1. Most academic literature pointed to a decline in the government's capacity to lead and govern. Scott, for example, summed up the SAR's early crisis as "the disarticulation of Hong Kong's post-handover political system", with the following defects: "[T]he relationships between the executive, the legislature and the bureaucracy today are uncoordinated, poorly developed, fractious and sometimes dysfunctional…. [W]ith a system which is neither parliamentary fish nor presidential fowl, the executive, the bureaucracy and the legislature (which is divided within itself) each pursue their own agendas, punctuated by occasional skirmishes on the boundaries of their domains and by subterranean campaigns to extend their jurisdictions"2. More fundamentally, it has to do with the post-1997 problems of institutional incompatibility resulting from a political regime originating in colonial times having to cope with post-colonial needs and demands3. Not only have the executive and bureaucracy been suffering a crisis of credibility, the legislature and political parties have also been in decline. 4 Despite the
Anthony B. L. Cheung (2010, forthcoming). Restoring Governability in Hong Kong: Managing Plurality and Joining Up Governance. In Julia Tao, Anthony Cheung, Chenyang Li & Martin Painter (Eds.), Governance for Harmony in Asia and Beyond. London: Routledge. 2 Scott, Ian (2000). The Disarticulation of Hong Kong's Post-Handover Political System. The China Journal, 43, 29. 3 Anthony B. L. Cheung (2005). Hong Kong's Post-1997 Institutional Crisis: Problems of Governance and Institutional Incompatibility. Journal of East Asian Studies, 5(1), 135-67. 4 According to polls conducted by different universities and research institutes since the Handover in 1997, all the major governance institutions (with the exception of the Judiciary) have experienced a continuous decline in public satisfaction and confidence ratings, with the SAR government the Chief Executive suffering a more severe setback than the civil service. Average scores achieved by major political parties/groups were also relatively low. See early year statistics cited in SynergyNet (2003) Hong Kong Deserves Better Governance, September, Hong Kong, Ch. 2. SynergyNet is an independent policy think-tank in Hong Kong. See also polls on "People's Satisfaction with the Performance of Members of the Fourth HKSAR Legislative Council" done by University of Hong Kong Public Opinion Programme (http://hkupop.hku.hk/chinese/popexpress /sargperf/fourthlc/index.html), with survey data indicating high dissatisfaction towards the The Hong Kong performance of the legislature during the period from September 2002 to April 2005, and a recent

上一页下一页