香港土地审裁处司法活动综述及启示

拆迁问题归根结底是利益问题,政府、开发商、被拆迁者三方进行着激烈的利益博弈。有利益就有纠纷,恶性、惨痛的拆迁纠纷时见报道,且愈演愈烈。拆迁该如何实现和谐？拆迁难题的解决可能需要系统性的改革,而土地纠纷的解决却有一个最基本的理念,即需要中立、独立、没有偏私的机构和人员以公平、公正、专业和高透明度的方式来解决纠纷,让利益的博弈回归到法律框架之下。香港土地审裁处解决土地纠纷的成功经验值得借鉴。     

Lingering environmental pessimism and the role of government in Hong Kong

Based on data from two opinion surveys conducted in 2000 and 2008, this study shows that Hong Kong people have been consistently highly aware of the seriousness of different environmental problems and relatively pessimistic about the future resolution of these problems. Such pessimism is arguably related to their lack of confidence in the government's enforcement of environmental protection. Through an analysis of the environmental policy‐making and enforcement agency and three selected enforcement cases, the study further finds that the people's lack of confidence can be traced to the government's failure to bring about a comprehensive, integrated, far‐sighted environmental strategy with sophisticated institutional support and detailed enforcement mechanisms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

香港警队建设的启示与思考

香港警队的职业建设在很多方面都值得我们学习借鉴,如潜移默化的价值观教育宣传、精益求精的敬业精神和高效负责的工作态度、警察安全第一的理念和切实关爱的保障措施、系统严密的内部管理机制、执行制度与监督制度执行互为一体的工作模式、警民一体的联防之策等。对此进行思考探讨,将对我们的警队建设工作大有裨益。     

Constructing a decolonized world city for consumption: discourses on Hong Kong Disneyland and their implications

The paper argues that, under the globalized economy, state power is far from diminishing. I study how the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government officials in 1999 developed “competition-development” discourse and “disappearing-world-city” discourse to persuade the public to approve the unequal and non-transparent Hong Kong–Disney deal for setting up the Hong Kong Disneyland (HKDL). I also examine how newspaper reports have circulated and have reinforced these two pairs of political discourses in wider popular discourse. I further reveal, in the post-colonial context of HongKong, how the HKDL project functions to accomplish decolonization tasks and to reshape Hong Kong as a consumption-based tourist spot instead of a citizen-based participatory community.     

香港廉政广告的策略及其启示

香港廉政广告在建设＂廉洁香港＂过程中发挥了重要作用,是香港反腐败成功经验中的重要方面。采用文本分析法,对香港廉政公署自1975～2008年之间所投放的66则电视廉政广告进行分析,可以发现香港廉政广告在诉求对象的选择、关键诉求的设计和诉求方式的运用等三方面都有策略性安排。这些经验知识对于近年来内地反腐倡廉建设过程中廉政广告手段的运用具有积极的启发价值。     

Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong

In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality of time or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. As Hong Kong's citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colony and claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions' national consciousness, discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers for grazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong's everyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers' sense of collective identity is shored-up as they reject the People's Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.     

The first and last signs of Main Street: semiosis and modality in California and Hong Kong Disneylands

Main Street is an indelible image in the American consciousness made hyperreal at Disneyland California in 1955. For subsequent parks in Tokyo and Paris, Disney recontextualized Main Street, but Hong Kong Disneyland’s version was formed as a copy of the California original. This copy demonstrates that transference of a structural form to a new cultural context is not a guarantee of the concomitant transmission of the originating culture’s sensory modality. The arising dissonant tension between the form (signifier) and substance (signified) of Hong Kong’s Main Street has led to its ongoing semiosis due to local cultural and corporate pressures. This paper presents a framework to analyze this dissonance and semiosis through comparison of external and internal photographs of the same eight landmarks at both parks. The problem of transferring meaning into a new cultural context for an international sign suggests Hong Kong’s Main Street could be the last that Disney constructs.     

Cognitive mobilization and electoral support for the Democratic Party in Hong Kong

The bases of electoral choice vary. Citizens differ in their ability to reason and make up their minds in different ways. Hong Kong appears to be the most likely case for the idea of cognitive mobilization, because of the the absence of socio-economic mobilization, the paucity of political mobilization, the novelty of partisanship, the high level of education, and the prosperous and easily accessible mass media. Findings on the legislative election in 1998, however, show that partisan attachment remains a powerful factor in electoral choice. Still, political information is more important as it broadens the basis of electoral choice. Specifically, the less-informed voters voted for the Democratic Party (DP) solely on the basis of partisan attachment. In comparison, the vote of the better-informed voters was broadly based, with evaluative factors overtaking partisanship in importance. This paper provides a contribution to the understanding of constrained elections in a partial democracy.     

Political context,policy networks and policy change: the complexity of transition in Hong Kong

Abstract

Central to the debates on the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is how this process has affected change in the policy process and policy outputs. Many see policy change as a result of the evolving political environment in Hong Kong following the political transition. This article, however, adopts the notion of policy networks and argues that the analysis of policy change cannot be reduced to a simple contextual stimulus – the policy alteration model. A case study – ‘the development of civic education’ – demonstrates the importance of policy networks, as a particular structure of government and group relations in decision making, in explaining the course of policy change. It is apparent that the relationship between regime change and political liberalization, on the one hand, and established networks, on the other, tends to be complex and dialectical in Hong Kong. Despite the importance of sovereignty transition and political restructuring, the effect of contextual factors on public policy greatly depends on the nature of the network involved.     

State-owned enterprises,state capitalism and social distribution in Singapore

State-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds have ‘insured’ Singapore's domestic economy against financial crisis and restructuring interventions from multilateral institutions, engendered elite cohesion and political stability, binding middle class employees to the political system. This essay analyses paths by which the Singapore government established state-owned enterprises and transformed them into global enterprises. It also examines how sovereign wealth funds contribute to government social expenditure without increasing taxes. Such redistribution through state capitalism resonates with the People's Action Partys social democratic origins, inviting comparisons with contemporary developments in Chinese state-capitalism.     

高官问责制度构建模式的多维比较——以中国内地和香港为分析案例

不同国家和地区发展阶段、历史传统和现实环境,决定了其面临不同的制约与困境,进而形成了不同的问责制度构建模式。选择中国内地和香港地区为案例,以集中比较分析为理论视角,经由对两地问责制度出台背景与内涵特征的对比研究,挖掘出二者在构建模式上的多维差异并得出结论:从决策程序层面,内地高官问责制度是以危机决策形式发生,而香港高官问责制度则遵循了一般意义上的常规决策程序;从制度构成层面,内地高官问责制是基于单项规则的推进,而香港高官问责制更强调制度体系的整体构建;从改革性质层面,内地选择在行政管理改革框架内推行高官问责制,而香港高官问责制则属于政治体制层面的尝试性改革。在此基础上进一步认为,在制度背景和改革序列意义上,两地问责制度的构建模式并无优劣之分,而只是路径依赖作用下的理性选择。     

Tackling unemployment in China: state capacity and governance issues

Abstract

This paper considers China's state capacity and changing governance as revealed through its policies to tackle unemployment. Despite high levels of growth, economic restructuring has resulted in rising unemployment over the last decade. The Chinese state has been able to manage job losses from state enterprises, demonstrating some state capacity in relation to this sector and some persistent command economy governance mechanisms. However both design and implementation of policies to compensate and assist particular groups among the unemployed have been shaped by weak state capacity in several other areas. First, capacity to gather accurate employment data is limited, meaning local and central governments do not have a good understanding of the extent and nature of unemployment. Second, the sustainability of supposedly mandatory unemployment insurance schemes is threatened by poor capacity to enforce participation. Third, poor central state capacity to ensure local governments implement policies effectively leads to poor unemployment insurance fund capacity, resulting in provision for only a narrow segment of the unemployed and low quality employment services. Although the adoption of unemployment insurance (and its extension to employers and employees in the private sector), the introduction of a Labour Contract Law in 2007, and the delivery of employment services by private businesses indicate a shift towards the use of new governance mechanisms based on entitlement, contract and private sector delivery of public-sector goods, that shift is undermined by poor state capacity in relation to some of these new mechanisms.     

Restraining Gulliver: Institutional reform and the strengthening of state capacity and compliance

Governance in the developing world is fraught with problems of corruption, weak institutions, and inadequate expertise among bureaucrats. Failing to enforce laws and regulations is one way in which these problems manifest themselves. In this paper, we evaluate changes across three institutions charged with oversight or administration of labor justice in Mexico. We find that both autonomy from the executive and professionalization are necessary to improve compliance with labor law over time. Our study shows that professionalization can occur in several ways, including through training, merit hiring, and introducing experienced external administrators. The implications of the study are that reforms that increase the independence and legal authority of oversight institutions should be complemented by efforts to strengthen the professionalism of bureaucrats.     

Government intervention in the economy: a comparative analysis of Singapore and Hong Kong

Singapore and Hong Kong are very different and yet very similar in many respects. A study of their current profiles and historical development indicates that the two have achieved comparable economic successes through different development strategies. After World War II, Singapore gained political independence while Hong Kong achieved economic restructuring. The Singapore government adopted an interventionist approach to develop its economy, while the Hong Kong government followed the laissez‐faire principle. However, as the two were maturing socially and economically in the last few decades, both governments found the necessity to adopt a hybrid strategy of mixing economic interventions with the free‐market approach. An examination of public finance and economic policies since the onset of the Asian economic turmoil shows that the two have become increasingly similar in their economic approaches, with heavy emphasis on stabilizing the economy and stimulating business activities through government initiatives. Based on their projected economic, social and political development, the Hong Kong government is expected to become more interventionist while its Singapore counterpart is expected to go in the opposite direction. The economic development strategies of the two governments, coming from two extremes, will become more alike in the foreseeable future, for reasons of political feasibility in the former. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hong Kong's political influence over China: institutional,informative, and interactive dynamics of sovereignty

Abstract

This article explores how Hong Kong has exercised political influence on China since the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, and tries to comprehend such seemingly impossible influences by reinterpreting the concept of sovereignty. It argues that the British Hong Kong existed as a ‘reference society’ for China's modernization and helped to change Chinese perceptions of capitalism. As this resulted in Chinese recognition of the legitimacy of Hong Kong's colonial institutions, which were featured with political legacies of civic freedom and the rule of law, it also reveals the institutional dimension of sovereignty. Secondly, the information flow from Hong Kong to China reflects a communicative (in contrast to coercive) nature of sovereignty, which highlights Hong Kong's central position in the Chinese world of information. Thirdly, Hong Kong's ongoing democratization challenges Chinese authoritarianism through societal interactions that are beyond state control. Conceptually, in this article, state sovereignty is argued as being something fluid and constantly reshaped in everyday practice with institutional, informative, and interactive dynamics; practically, it attempts to find some remaining ‘silver lining’ to the growing authoritarian Chinese clouds above Hong Kong as reversing the logic of examining external factors in democratization.     

The New Public Management Reform and Governance in Asian NICs: A Comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore1

This article compares the New Public Management (NPM) reform in Hong Kong and Singapore. First of all, it highlights how the macroeconomic environment, the political system, and state traditions, factors that are commonly identified as affecting the pattern of NPM reform in western liberal democracies, assume different contexts and significance in affecting reform in Asian states. With these general factors, we further compare the NPM reform of these two Asian newly industrialized countries in the areas of economic, administrative, and social governance, and identify the similarities and differences in the objectives of reform, the levels of reform, and the factors affecting such reform in these two cases.     

Capacity Building as an Instrument of Institutional Reform: Improving the Quality of Higher Education through Academic Audits in the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, and Hong Kong

As countries convert from state to market-centered public policies, there is increasing interest in new forms of public accountability. Capacity building initiatives that reform institutional frameworks are useful policy instruments during this period of transition. What are the impacts and implementation problems characteristic of this approach? This article reviews the experience with "Academic Audit," a capacity building accountability instrument for universities adopted in the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Academic audits altered the incentives for cooperative behavior among faculty members to improve student learning. Identified implementation problems included: training for the new process, the uncertainty of capacity building benefits, and the central role of information.     

The usefulness of key performance indicators to public accountability authorities in East Asia

Has the mandated reporting of key performance indicators (KPIs) by public agencies to public accountability or reporting authorities in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore helped these authorities in their task to hold the agencies to account? This article argues that the sheer existence of KPIs in public agencies' annual reports and budget papers does not automatically lead to their effective use by the authorities for making decisions about the agencies' performance achievements. The utilization of KPIs for making decisions by the participating authorities in these countries could be best described as careful and cautious because of their perceptions that the KPIs have failed to meet their performance information needs. Since the implementation of a performance measurement and reporting system has been linked to both instrumental and symbolic benefits, perhaps the main value of the current systems lies less with their ability to bring about instrumental benefits to reporting authorities and other stakeholders. Instead, their primary strength may be skewed towards their capacity to accrue symbolic benefits for the government. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The autocratic mandate: elections,legitimacy and regime stability in Singapore

This paper explains how authoritarian regimes employ flawed elections to obtain both short-term legitimacy and long-term stability. In conjunction with the use of co-optation and repression, it argues that ruling parties hold de jure competitive elections to claim what is termed autonomous legitimation. This denotes the feigning of conformity to the established rules of the constitution and the shared beliefs of citizens. Regardless of overall turnout and support, ruling parties exploit the normative and symbolic value of elections in order to establish moral grounds for compliance within a dominant-subordinate relationship. In support of this argument, the case of Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP) is analysed in historical and contemporary terms. Since 1959, the PAP has used precisely timed elections to extract one or more mandate types from citizens and, by extension, claim legitimacy. In particular, it has sort a mandate based on its response to an event, execution of a policy and/or collection of a reward. In the long run, autocratic stability has been achieved through a process of reciprocal reinforcement, which has combined autonomous legitimation with targeted co-optation and low intensity coercion. The paper concludes by addressing the generalisability of this finding for other authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia.