Latest Articles
From Colonial Governance to Aligning with National Planning: Hong Kong Must Build a Policy Research Ecosystem
Hong Kong's 156 years of British rule left it with no tradition of long-term planning, and the post-handover efforts to build policy research capacity remain inadequate for aligning with national five-year planning. The authors argue that the SAR must now treat local policy research as core infrastructure — backed by redesigned public funding, opened commissioning pipelines, and a sustained talent pipeline.
Planning Is Not Consultation: The Real Test of Hong Kong's First Five-Year Plan
Hong Kong's first Five-Year Plan will be judged not by the document produced but by the planning capacity built along the way. The real challenge is that genuine planning requires sustained, professional policy research — the very thing Hong Kong has yet to develop.
From '50 Years of No Change' to 'Recognising, Responding, and Pursuing Change' (Part 3): Pathways and Methods to Overcome Resistance to Reform
Drawing on Tung Chee-hwa's reform experience and historical precedents, the final instalment of this trilogy examines how Hong Kong can overcome resistance to reform — through blueprint planning, trust-building signals, and crisis management at turning points.
From '50 Years of No Change' to 'Recognising, Responding, and Pursuing Change' (Part 2)
Part 2 of the '50 Years of No Change' series examines why reform consistently meets strong resistance: the asymmetric pain between reform's losers and winners, and the political power of entrenched special interest groups — from Hong Kong's taxi trade to the New Territories indigenous-inhabitant land rights entrenched by the Basic Law and the byzantine public-housing system.
From '50 Years of No Change' to 'Recognising, Responding, and Pursuing Change' (Part 1)
This first part of a three-part series examines how Hong Kong's '50 Years of No Change' pledge — originally designed to steady the post-1997 transition — paradoxically fostered nostalgia, colonial nostalgia, and an exclusionary localism that left the city unprepared for the reform-driven 'Second Return'.
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