Since the handover of Hong Kong from being a British colony back to a special administrative region of China in 1997, it has suffered from a series of political turmoil in which the executive found great difficulties in exerting public support on its rule while failing to build a cooperative relationship with the legislature. The existing political system is criticised greatly by the society for its outdated design that fails to cope with the rising demand from the public and to achieve any constructive progress in political development in Hong Kong. In the paper, explanations about the incompetence of the chief executives (CE) in Hong Kong will be focused under the umbrella of lacking legitimacy and institutional weakness that pose hurdles for the CE in his governance as well as providing suggestions to improve their performance.
The executive is defined as the central policy-making mechanism (Li, 2012). In Hong Kong, the structure of the executive is clearly stated in the Basic Law (1990) that it is headed by the CE which follows the governing ideology of executive-led system. The CE is supported by a group of principle officials who are responsible for formulating policies and supervising those bureaus and departments they are in charge of while a large batch of civil servants bears the duties of enforcing and implementing the policies approved by their seniors.
Institutional design
To start with, the introduction of accountability system of the principal officials (ASPO) in 2002 by Tung Chee-hwa hampers a smooth working relationship between principal officials and civil service that eventually leads to blunders on the executive of Hong Kong. Before that, principal officials (PO) were groomed and chosen from civil service t...
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...system, including all the others. The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/21551482 Tong, T. (2005). Can the principal official accountability system help to resolve the governance problem in hong kong after 1997?. (Master's thesis)Retrieved from http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/133963/3/FullText.pdf?accept=1
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Hong Kong Reading - "The Book of the Year" Through imperialism, British rule encouraged industrialization and modernization which led to visible growth in the economy as the city is described as a trade center and important in manufacturing and banking, which suggests that the industries and businesses prospered. Additionally, the fear of Chinese rule suggests that businesses operated better under British rule, which shows how imperialism improved the lives of the people of Hong Kong compared to the government before imperial rule. The way that citizens of Hong Kong left the colony before it was returned to China further highlights the different effects of British rule and Chinese rule on the people, suggesting that British rule was preferred by the citizens of Hong Kong which is why they left rather than live under Chinese rule. This implies that the colonized people considered Great Britain’s imperialist rule to be better than the government before which was Chinese. This demonstrates that imperialism improved the lives of the colonized people because it helped the economy grow and prosper.
According to Kettl (2015) systems have four elements for holding public administrators accountable, namely; standing setting, voluntary compliance, sanctions, and monitoring. He further states that accountability is a matter of balancing internal norms with external processes. Presidents come with their policies and influence government to be efficient, effective and expeditious in service delivery. They minimize unnecessary government overspending and cut the budget where necessary. They even apply the common phrase “doing more with less” when they want more production by employing less resources.
Hong Kong has always remained a very unique city, one which is said to have ‘a Western past, an Eastern future’. Since its colonisation by the British in the 1860s, it has maintained to a very large extent its Chinese identity and its connection to its Motherland, while at the same time, has frequent contact with the Western world, politically, economically, and culturally. Hong Kong’s unique position has made the city a vibrant international metropolis that acts as a bridge between East and West. Yet after it was returned to China in 1997, this former British colony has been constantly reassessing its British past, struggling to find its new position and redefining its identity.
Focuses the root of corruption on the character, or lack thereof, of the individual officer. This explanation proposes that corruption is the result of poor selection practices that fail to screen out applicants who are unsuitable for public service (Withrow & Dailey, p. 4).
The executive branch at the federal level is the President of the United States, at the federal level it is the fifty governors and at the local level it is the thousands of mayors who serve in towns and cities across America. Each of these executives have a role in the formation of crime control policy and are often seen as the representative of government who can address problems such as crime.
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From a Confucian and East Asian perspective, the fault with any society is solely attributed to the elite, never to the general public. The belief is that the elite can engage in negative opportunism because of their status and power. They can take advantage of opportunities to exploit their people (Magagna 10/26). To understand the effects of such negative opportunists, one must consider an exemplary hierarchy as imagined by
In recent years, Hong Kong education system has undergone a great change. In the past, students studied five-year junior secondary education, two-year senior secondary education and three-year tertiary education. Since school year 2009/10, secondary and tertiary education composed of three-year junior secondary education, three-year senior education and four-year tertiary education (3-3-4 Scheme). Apart from the academic structure of education system, new compulsory subjects like Liberal Studies was also introduced to facilitate independent thinking of students. The examples given above showed that the HKSAR government is working hard to change the education system from similar to the British system, to similar to the Chinese system. Given that Hong Kong’s education system changes from time to time, how will the sociologists see from these changes? The following essay is going to discuss the education system of Hong Kong based on the following three sociological perspective: the structural-functional approach, the social-conflict approach and the symbolic-interaction approach.
The executive branch includes the head of government/head of state and their cabinet. As the leader of the state, the executive is considered the “top-tier of government.” Their job is to be the political leader of a country. In the case of
The study of public administration only continued to grow over the course of the next two decades. As the study of public administration expanded, so did the development of s...
Burns stated that leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomenon on earth; however, I believe that if we are able to understand Huxham and Vangen’s proposed cyclical connection, we are in turn allowing for a better understanding of leadership. From this, I understand that leadership is in part a product of leadership legitimacy, with the bulk of the product originating from predetermined structures, process, and participants. This not only affects leadership effectiveness, it also effects the role ethics and accountability plays. Ethics is crucial to the influence of power, tools, and skills used by leaders. For example, if the executive director of Bridges, a non-profit in Memphis, wanted to add more programs the way she would motivate her employees to do so should be in an ethical yet efficient way. However, if she decides to make use of her ability to manipulate her employees in an unethical manner, she would still be acting as a leader despite the tactic used to do so. Despite the opportunity to not do so, leaders in public administration, more specifically those in the public sector, should use ethics as they serve in their various leadership roles since their implementation and carryout of a policy directly impacts those around them. Likewise, accountability is also held at a constant for leaders in the public sector. Much like with their ethical values, leaders are to be able to effectively implement action that they can be held accountable
Public personnel administration consists of three general systems. The first one I’ll talk about is civil service. The civil service helps to protect employee rights and safeguard efficiency. Historically, personnel administration shifted from emphasizing the value of responsiveness to emphasizing political neutral competence among public employees. Before they would use the spoils system and the patronage system, which selected employees and awarded government contracts based on loyalty or party affiliation. In this present day, we are using more of the civil service system, which is a method of choosing employees based on certain formal qualifications such as competitive exams instead of political patronage. It all start...