An exercise in improving suicide reporting in print media

This study was conducted to support the publication of guidelines for media reporting on suicide. First, quantitative and qualitative aspects of suicide reporting in Swiss print media were surveyed over a time span of 8 months. The results were presented at a national press conference, and written guidelines for suicide reporting were sent out to all newspaper editors. The results of the survey and the guidelines were discussed in a personal meeting with the Editor-in-Chief of the main tabloid. After the publication of the guidelines a second, identical survey was conducted. The main variables regarding frequency, form, and content of the newspaper reports before and after the press conference were compared. The number of articles, on the one hand, increased over the 3 years between the first and second survey, but the quality of reporting clearly improved on the other. The personal contact with the editor of the tabloid was probably the most effective means of intervention.     

The Politics of Policing the Anti-WTO Protests in Hong Kong

The confrontations between anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protestors and Hong Kong police proved that their earlier encounters brought about uncompromising attitudes and escalating activities on both sides. As a result, riots on the penultimate day of the WTO meeting were inevitable. Applying David Waddington's flashpoint model, this article shows that other factors at the structural, political/ideological, cultural, contextual and situational levels were at play, creating an environment conducive to violence. Waddington's model provides a useful framework for us to comprehend the interactional dynamics of the anti-WTO protests in Hong Kong. However, it has neglected the possibility of an interactive bond between protestors and the public. The contextual uniqueness of forging a dynamic relationship between protestors and the public can enrich Waddington's analytical framework.     

Competence Trust,Reflexivity and Risk Management in Hong Kong

Abstract

Trust is an essential element of governance. Lack of trust in government engenders doubts regarding its competence, weakens its legitimacy, and creates difficulties in the process of governing. As suggested, declining trust was related to reflexivity. This article, based on a Hong Kong study, confirms that a lack of competence trust in the government's ability to manage work-related risks correlated with reflexivity. Self-identified social status also influences the degree of reflexivity and competence trust. The conventional approach to cultivating trust through managed social participation has been widely practiced, but the results have not led to an increase in competence trust in Hong Kong, even when the policy outcomes are positive. While recognizing that reflexivity and its impacts on trust are inevitable, this article argues that efforts should be made to develop critical trust through meaningful participation in the deliberative process.     

Risk,Reflexivity and Sub-politics: Environmental Politics in Hong Kong

Increasing attention has been drawn to the risk posed by air pollution, a risk that has wide-ranging effects (on the environment, health, the economy, culture, urban design and politics). New environmental movements and political agendas have emerged in the past 10 years. A growing number of social groups have been formed to express their concerns and challenge established laws and rules. This paper will borrow Ulrich Beck's concepts of risk, reflexivity and sub-politics to analyse the new social movement that addresses air quality in Hong Kong. While previous environmental problems were considered manageable, air pollution is a risk that seems to defy solution. As a result of the institutional failure to deal with this risk, there has been a new alignment of interests and the emergence of a new form of politics—a sub-politics that leads to a sharing of power between established and informal politics, and the government and society. Although established political institutions have been receptive, altering the rules and increasing public participation, the extent of sub-politicization is still limited. This is due, in part, to the overall absence of reflexive self-regulation among individuals in the society, which might lead to a state of ‘disorganized irresponsibility’.     

Managing the Public Sector in Hong Kong: Trends and Adjustments

Public sector management in Hong Kong was initially designed to rule the territory as a British colony. A number of changes took place in the last quarter century before Hong Kong's reintegration with China and the nature of public sector management has transformed over this period. An overview of administrative principles and practices and an analysis of changes reveal trends that were influenced by both local and international factors. The framework of traditional public administration in the territory adapted effectively to embrace the principles of new public management without much difficulty. The global economic crisis compelled the government to revise its strategies to expand public spending and adopt a further reduced role in the provision of public services. New social, economic and political challenges are driving Hong Kong to adjust to the changing circumstances and trends, and four noticeable shifts can be identified. They include shifts from an administrative to a political executive, from job cuts to job creation, from financial restraint to increased spending, and from public to private sector provision of public services. The trends are driven by local and international forces as well as the progress of democratization and political awareness in Hong Kong.     

Comparative grand corruption and protection pacts among elites: the cases of Ao Man Long in Macao and Hui Si-Yan in Hong Kong

Although Transparency International has consistently ranked the governments of both the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR), both under the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), much higher on the clean governance scale than the PRC itself, the reality is that the two special administrative regions witnessed two prominent cases of political corruption comparable to the mainland corruption. These were the Ao Man Long case in Macao and the Rafael Hui Si-yan scandal in Hong Kong. This paper examines the two cases of political corruption in both Macao and Hong Kong and makes comparisons and contrasts between them. It argues that individual greed contributed to the two cases of high-level bureaucratic (grand) corruption in Macao and Hong Kong, implying that institutional safeguards against corruption, such as the establishment of anti-corruption commissions, and the scrutiny of the mass media, are by no means adequate. In other words, institutional mechanisms against corruption in the HKSAR and MSAR do have loopholes that need to be plugged. Moreover, protection pacts between a minority of government officials and the business elites can be formed because of their close personal connections, strengthening the possibility of grand corruption.     

香港警司警诫跟进服务与上海考察教育工作之比较

作者作为上海市阳光社区青少年事务中心第二批赴港考察成员之一,在香港青年协会及其下属机构人员的帮助下,重点考察了香港未成年人警司警诫跟进服务的有关情况。在专程拜访了解和广泛搜集资料的基础上,对香港的警司警诫跟进服务与上海目前正在积极推进的未成年人考察教育工作进行了初步比较。     

Organization design and effectiveness: a study of anti-crime organizations in Hong Kong

There are various methods of designing organizations to adjust to the needs of the circumstances, clients and administrators. The literature on organizations highlighted various aspects as it developed and the emphasis shifted over time. Different approaches were tried in two cases in Hong Kong where organizations were designed to deal with specific problems of corruption and organized crime. While the social approach appeared to be more sensitive to the needs of the target group, the institutional approach emerged as a more effective option. In designing organizations, it is necessary to consider the social and psychological aspects, but the nature of structure, stability of environment and regularity of procedures have a profound impact on the effectiveness.     

Policy Relations and Policy Subsystems: Financial Policy in Hong Kong and Singapore

Existing studies of Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s success as leading Asian international financial centers (IFCs) have largely focused on economic structural factors at the neglect of political economic contextual variables. Taking a policy subsystems approach and based on extensive field research, this article attempts to address this shortcoming by conceptualizing the “policy relations” that exist between state, industry, and other non-state actors in the two IFCs and delineating the “division of policy roles” among these actors. In the process, this article contributes toward the existing IFC literature and conceptualizes the sociopolitical relations that exist among financial sector actors.     

Conversationalism,constitutional economics,and bicameralism strategies for political reform in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has at long last regained the economic momentum lost in the wake of the Asian financial crisis and the collapse of the local property market. However, political friction and uncertainty have escalated rather than subsided, because of deep‐rooted divisions over the pace of democratic reform. There are no simple remedies for the constitutional deadlock that has emerged. Nevertheless, it might be possible to improve the overall political climate and both the form and substance of the dialog regarding fundamental institutional reform by borrowing some ideas from constitutional economics.     

The Study of Public Administration in Hong Kong and Macao: Evolutionary Paths and Implications

Comparatively speaking, the birth and the growth of public administration programmes, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, in Hong Kong and Macao have been a response to the increasing need for the training of students and civil servants in the discipline of public administration. Since the 1990s, the proliferation of Master of Public Administration (MPA) programmes in both the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions can be explained by the demand for local people to govern the two places in accordance with the principle of ‘one country, two systems’. The content of various MPA programmes also reflects the changing political and administrative circumstances; its public administration focus has been accompanied by core courses training students from a variety of disciplines, ranging from public finance to economics, from public policy analyses to globalization, and from regional planning to a deeper understanding of mainland Chinese government and politics. In both Hong Kong and Macao, some graduates from both the Bachelor and Master programmes have joined the civil service or enhanced their skills in public sector management and governance. Although the medium of instruction varies from one university to another, their programme objective shares one thing in common: the imperative of training existing civil servants and students to join the governments of Hong Kong and Macao. This paper compares and contrasts the development of public administration programmes in Hong Kong and Macao and examines its theoretical implications for the changing relations between politics and public administration.     

An Alternative Understanding of Political Participation: Challenging the Myth of Political Indifference in Hong Kong

Abstract

The characterization of Hong Kong's political culture as one of indifference deserves further examination as the inquiries conducted by proponents of the indifference framework have all used a narrow definition of political participation. This paper begins with a critique of the inherent narrowness of orthodox definitions of political participation: political participation as acts making demands on a government; as lawful activities; and as activities vis‐a‐vis one government. Contrast these assumptions, the author contends that political participation needs to be understood as activities that include both making demands on and showing support for a government, as well as both lawful and unlawful activities. Furthermore, the author refutes the one‐government‐locus theme of the orthodox concept and proposes a three‐government‐loci theme that is more relevant to the historical experience of the colonial Hong Kong. The political relevance of the social domain and its implications on broadening the definition of political participation are discussed. Finally, the author argues for the importance of considering discursive participation as a form of political participation in Hong Kong.     

Democratization in East Asia in the late 1980s: Taiwan breakthrough,Hong Kong frustration

Political history took an unexpected turn in East Asia in the late 1980s. The booming movement in Hong Kong had gone downhill and suffered defeat, while the authoritarian Taiwan state actively sponsored genuine democratic reforms. What then explains the Taiwan democratic breakthrough and the Hong Kong democratic frustration? This article argues that conventional explanations offered in the modernization, the dependency, and the class literature—such as culture, liberal colonialism, wealth, new middle class, bureaucratic-authoritarian state, crises, and absence of conservative class coalition—are unable to account for the divergent paths of democratic development in Taiwan and Hong Kong. As an alternative, this article presents a model that highlights the importance of conjuncture factors. It is argued that since Taiwan and Hong Kong have shared similar structural conditions, researchers have to bring in conjuncture factors such as the historical event of Chinese unification, the capacity of the political agency to promote democratic reforms, and the strategy of protest in order to explain the Taiwan breakthrough and the Hong Kong frustration.     

The challenge of assessing governance in Asian states: Hong Kong in the Worldwide Governance Indicators ranking

As countries in Asia work towards achieving development, the state of governance emerged as a benchmark for them. Assessing governance is an important exercise because a country’s image is influenced by its position in world rankings which plays a role in decisions by the international community regarding aid and trade. The methodology adopted in preparing the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) rankings underlines the preference for some values that are dominant in Western liberal democratic systems. This places Asian states at a disadvantage as other traditional values are ignored in assessing the state of governance. This article examines the methods and criteria of the WGI with reference to the case of Hong Kong. An overview of the critiques of WGI and analysis of the scores awarded to Hong Kong reveal the challenge of assessing governance across countries with the same instrument without taking into consideration the context of the units. The article argues that there is a need for developing alternative criteria for accommodating indigenous institutional structures, processes, and practices to ensure that Asian countries can benefit from the desired values of governance and help overcome the partial picture of governance that emerges in the WGI.     

One-hundred cases of suicide in Budapest: a case-controlled psychological autopsy study

The authors performed a case-controlled psychological autopsy study of 100 successive suicides in Budapest, examining the presence of major depression, alcohol, and drug and/or medicament dependency/ abuse according to DSM-IV. The presence of somatic diseases, psychosocial stress, oppressive experiences, and interpersonal relationship disorders within the period of 1 month previous to death was also examined. The control group of 100 people who died of natural causes was identical with the suicide group in respect of number, sex, and age. RESULTS: Among those committing suicide, psychosocial stress, oppressive experiences, and interpersonal relationship disorders were much more frequent and behavioral changes occurred more often in the weeks preceding death compared to the control group. A single suicide attempt during one's life span did not prove to be predictive for a later fatal action, but multiple attempts did. Major depression was diagnosed in 36% of the cases in the suicide group and 17% in the control group. Half of major-depressed suicides (18 persons) and almost all in the control group (16 persons) suffered from reactive (secondary) major depression as a result of somatic disease. Severe alcoholism was found in 33% of the suicide cases and in 44% of the control group. Drug and/or medicament consumption (misuse and/or abuse) occurred in 14% and 8% of the cases, respectively. The data emphasize again that alcoholism seems to be one of the most serious problems in Hungary both in psychological and somatic illnesses.