One of the most important directives Premier Li Qiang delivered in his Government Work Report on Thursday was his call to enhance the governance efficiency of the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions in accordance with the law, emphasizing the need for them to achieve long-term prosperity and stability by leveraging their unique strengths and important roles.
The call is timely amid some recent incidents that exposed shortcomings in the civil service, including inadequate supervision and forward planning.
Recently, Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, also emphasized that Hong Kong should uphold an executive-led governance model, prioritize administrative efficiency, and align with national development goals. To achieve this, the HKSAR’s civil service must intensify efforts to improve governance efficiency and build a results-oriented, visionary, and proactive government.
As a seasoned civil servant, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu clearly recognizes the problems within the civil service and has pushed for comprehensive reform.
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The core issue holding back the civil service is complacency. Some civil servants believe they can get by doing the bare minimum, avoiding launching new initiatives to minimize the risk of mistakes, adopting a “do little, wrong little” attitude, and relying on the protection of the “iron rice bowl”. According to civil service records, from September 2023 to January 2026, only four civil servants were ordered to take compulsory retirement for unsatisfactory performance, an incredibly low figure for a civil service of 190,000.
Therefore, a key objective of civil service reform should be to break this iron rice bowl mentality. We could learn from the staff system of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), in which all employees are hired on fixed-term contracts of 2.5 years. The system ensures that every staff member undergoes a formal performance review and integrity check at the end of each contract period. Those who fail to meet the required standards are not offered renewal. Knowing that hard work is necessary to secure another contract creates a strong incentive for performance. The civil service must adopt a proactive approach by requiring all staff to undergo a formal performance appraisal and integrity review every three years, and requiring underperformers or those giving rise to integrity concerns to resign or retire compulsorily.
Second, senior civil servants must be encouraged to adopt a visionary mindset — not merely “holding the fort” or “keeping the house in order”. To this end, each department should produce a five-year strategic plan aligned with the national five-year plan as well as an annual progress report.
However, implementing such strategic plans is restricted by the compulsory retirement age of 60 for department heads, a ridiculously young age given that some are just reaching their prime, and the wastage of valuable experience. Often, by the time a civil servant is promoted to head a department, they are already over 55 and can serve for only a few more years, thereby discouraging long-term planning. One solution is to offer department heads fixed-term contracts of two to three years upon promotion, renewable only on the basis of outstanding performance but extendable beyond the normal retirement age of 60. This would help ensure more visionary, creative, and accountable leadership.
The current staff appraisal system also needs to be overhauled. In most departments, staff are graded under five categories: outstanding, very good, good, moderate, and poor. In practice, to avoid conflict, most civil servants receive “outstanding” or “very good” ratings, with very few rated “moderate” or “poor”. A forced ranking system could be introduced, categorizing staff by percentage — such as top 10 percent, top 30 percent, top 50 percent, bottom 40 percent, and bottom 10 percent. To ensure fairness, rankings should be determined by a review panel that provides confidential grading rather than by a single appraiser. Consistently ranking in the bottom 10 percent should signal that one’s position is at risk and that improved performance is expected to retain employment. At the same time, a reward system should be introduced to incentivize constant improvements. Those ranked consistently in the top 10 percent would receive an annual cash bonus.
The civil service should also introduce the concept of supervisory accountability. This means that if a civil servant is found to have committed a grave error or shown negligence in his or her performance, the relevant supervisors should be held accountable unless they can prove they took all practical steps to prevent the error. Have the supervisors practiced “management by walking around”? Have they carried out surprise supervisory inspections? This is similar to the supervisory accountability mechanism for corruption prevention introduced by the ICAC.
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Finally, the civil service should undertake zero-based budgeting exercises to identify unnecessary or obsolete tasks and reallocate or reduce staff accordingly. It should be noted that Hong Kong’s 190,000 civil servants far exceed Singapore’s 80,000, even though Singapore’s population of 6.11 million is only slightly less than Hong Kong’s 7.5 million. A review should also be conducted on the future need for the Administrative Officer (AO) grade. Given the rapid, highly technical changes in the world, the civil service increasingly requires highly-qualified professionals with specialized training to head certain posts and run departments, rather than generalist AOs. It would be more effective for each department to conduct its own recruitment rather than for AOs to rotate among departments. This would allow each department to retain its high performers, who are familiar with their respective operations, rather than losing them to other departments under the current mandatory rotational transfers. The latter system was introduced during the British era to cultivate a cadre of generalist administrators when governance at the time did not require specialist knowledge in certain fields. But that system is no longer adequate to administer a society as complex as modern Hong Kong, which is at the forefront of international financial services, logistics, global trade, cutting-edge scientific research, and innovation, and on top of all that, capable of contributing to resolving various international issues, such as climate change and artificial intelligence.
Hence, the recent government advertisement for direct recruitment to fill two director-level positions marks a step in the right direction. For the first time, applications are now open for the posts of Director of Information Services and Director of Food and Environmental Hygiene — roles traditionally held by AOs.
The author is an honorary fellow of HKU Space and Hong Kong Metropolitan University, an advisor with Our Hong Kong Foundation, and a former deputy commissioner of the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
