Hong Kong: a self-reforming civil service institution at a crossroads

This chapter briefly recounts the historical trajectory of Hong Kong’s bureaucrat-led administrative reforms and highlights the new challenges, uncertainties, and their impact on institutional stability and sustainability. Such trajectory unveils not only changing administration-politics interfaces in different periods and contexts over the past decades, but also an institution undergoing both voluntary and externally imposed transformation. As a special administrative region of China since 1997, there has been growing tension and competition between local politics and the bureaucracy. Also, the national factor has become more prominent partly because of recent political unrest. In the years ahead, Hong Kong’s public administration is expected to display political loyalty and competence under ‘one country, two systems’, and pay greater attention to national goals and priorities, even as the city remains an international metropolis with good links to the West.