Press Release

 

 

Speech by SCS at International Conference

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Following is a speech (English only) by the Secretary for the Civil Service, Mr W K Lam, at the opening session of the "International Conference on Public Management and Governance in the New Millennium" today (Monday):

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for inviting me. I am privileged to address this distinguished gathering of learned scholars and experienced practitioners from all over the World. And the themes of the Conference sessions are so important to us at this time: "Globalization and Economic Change", "Democratization and Social Change", "Governance in the Information Age". They are all happening here simultaneously. You can find few better places than Hong Kong to discuss these issues.

Whenever I chair brain storming sessions with my colleagues, I like to start with the question : "What are we here for?" So what are we here for, coming for some of you thousands of miles to spend a couple of days in this city? As I understand it, this Conference is to contribute "towards the on-going global debate on the future direction of public management and governance reforms, with special reference to the Asian context." So although I have been given the free hand to say whatever I want to say, I shall focus on this theme.

On New Millenium's eve, sipping Chinese tea in the quietness of home and watching TV broadcast on how other great cities celebrate the coming of the Millennium, I found my mind drifting back to history. To the first centuries of the previous two millenniums in China. In the beginning of the first millenium, the once powerful Han Dynasty was at its ebb. The government was run by a top bureaucrat called Wang Mang. Dissatisfied with the limits of what he could do as an official, he threw out his emperor and took the throne himself. He could have stopped there and enjoyed his power, but his real aim was to reform the old empire. He started a massive reform program, which could probably be regarded as the first attempt in socialism on earth, with high energy and single-minded will. But he faced strong resistance from the powerful vest interests. The Imperial Court's heirs took to the arms and started a short but bloody civil war. The outcome was that Wang was killed, the Imperial family restored, and status quote continued for another 200 years until the Han Dynasty eventually crumbled under the weight of its stagnation.

What happened in the first century of the 2nd Millennium ? Another top official called Wang An Shi, [curiously, both reformers were surnamed Wang, though they bear no relation to one another], was tasked by his emperor to launch reforms of a comparable scale to that a thousand years ago. He did it with no less fervor, though he never attempted to seize power, always working within the limits of his delegated authority. But like his predecessor, he met with insurmountable resistance from the vest interests and officials who prefer to tread safely along their ancestors' path than to risk sailing into uncharted waters. The reform collapsed after six years. Wang was dismissed. The Sung Dynasty later lost half of its territories to the northern nomads, and eventually the entire empire to the Mongolians.

The lessons that we may learn from history are probably these: that you cannot tackle all your problems in one go for otherwise you would invite so much resistance that you end up not being able to achieve anything. But you must at the same time persevere with your ultimate goal for otherwise inertia and stagnation will certainly set in, especially in the public sector, which is huge and complex and not subject to the discipline of the competitive market. [The other lesson is perhaps that you mustn't do it only once every thousand years!]

Let me come back to the 21st century, back to Hong Kong. We have a well established and highly institutionalized public service system, molded on the basis of the good British civil service tradition of meritocracy and impartiality. We did have a bad history of widespread corruption back in the 50s and 60s. But syndicated corruption had been weeded out since the mid-70s when we set up an independent institution and mobilized the entire community to tackle it. Now, according to the latest international Gallup poll done in October last year, only 7 per cent of our people believe that the government is corrupt, compared to the worldwide average of 41 per cent.

Despite the popular game of bashing the civil service, practiced daily by our media and politicians, our top civil servants still maintain a comfortable lead in opinion polls over most politicians in the legislature. And despite the poor rating for the Government as a whole since the Asian financial crisis and the ensuing recession, a neat 32 per cent of the public still perceived this administration as being responsive to the will of the people, compared to the worldwide average of 10 per cent and a corresponding rating of 14 per cent in the UK and just 5 per cent in the US, according to the results of the same Gallap poll. Not a bad score at all by international benchmarks.

Why should this be so? It is because this civil service has a solid track record of having provided decent service in a fair way and at low cost to the public. Given our constitutional status and unique history, this civil service has been tasked with the job of governance to a more complex extent than many of our counterparts elsewhere. We take on both the political job of setting and championing the government agenda as well as the more mundane but no less important job of translating these agendas into reality.

We have not done badly : we have housed half of our population who would otherwise be in shanty towns; we provide decent health care to the entire population at minimal cost to patients; we safe-net our weak and aged without they having to contribute to social security taxes; and we run a world class city with top infrastructure through wise public investments and through partnership with the private sector. Yet we are probably charging our people the least in the developed world in terms of taxes.

But past achievements do not guarantee future success. It may indeed be a hindrance as complacency sets in. The "if it isn't broken why mend it" attitude could also turn an otherwise successful institution into a stumbling block for progress. The two episodes down my memory lane in Chinese history proves this point. The world, Asia, this city is changing fast, real fast, and it is going to change even faster in this Millennium. As we can clearly see it even today, the fundamentals of governance have been shifting irreversibly : from providing for subsistence to providing for quality; from subservience of the public to respect for citizens' rights; from "grand daddy in the government knows best" to increasing public participation in policy making and in monitoring of government abuses. That is what it will be. And that is what it should be. The question that every government now faces is this: are we prepared for it ?

As I can see it, there are three huge forces at work that will guarantee decades of massive worldwide changes, of which we have only just seen the beginnings.

First, the rapidly reshaping world economy since the end of Cold War. Unless the Almighty calls an end to this planet, human history will not come to an end yet as Mr Fujimori predicted. But the ideology war did seem to have come to an end by and large. And now practically every nation, every government, every corporation is plunging into intense competition for profits and for economic growth. When gunboats are docked, when nuclear missiles are mothballed, when half of the world finally wake up from their socialist dreams, we all realize that we must now compete on knowledge, on quality, and above all on our ability to master change. And again that is what it should be.

Second, technological revolution in this dawn of the information age is already causing havoc to the old order in an unthinkable way. Its effect goes real deep because it cuts down distance, it breaks down boundaries, and it marginalizes time. It is reshaping production and logistics across the world. Production costs are lowered by the day. Yet, it is still just an infant.

Third, and this is an irony, despite but also because of the first two factors, social conflicts are actually likely to multiply: demographic change, a natural result of a more peaceful and better world, will push the present 5.5 billion population to some 9 billion during the first half of the new century; aspirations and expectations of peoples, closely in touch with the rest of the world through cheap telecommunications, are going to grow faster than most governments can deliver; teething problems of pollution and resource depletion, of disparities between the knowledge worker and the unskilled worker, of increasing financial market turbulence on a global scale, and of the inevitable friction among various social strata as nations, governments and firms scramble to come on top of the competition game.

These factors will put intense pressure on all types of human institutions. And public institutions in charge of governance will be under the greatest challenge of all, from at least four sides:

First, nation states will find the exercise of their discretionary power within their territories increasingly trimmed by international institutions such as the World Trade Organization. Genuine globalization of trade and finance, made possible by the advance of information technology, has unleashed some as yet unpredictable powers that few countries can on their own harness. In return for some form of international order to manage these powers, increasingly nation states will have to undergo the discomfort of losing a degree of sovereignty. The present international order and cooperative institutions will have to undergo some very fundamental changes in the years ahead. Some very profound and original soul searching on how to manage this new and as yet unpredictable international order will have to be undertaken, in the ministries, among the universities, and above all among the thinking public who are going to have to be convinced to accept the discomfort and perhaps even of some pain in this inevitable process of change and adjustment. The Seattle riots are just but an initial warning signal. We probably haven't seen nothing yet!

Second, governments will be facing an increasingly well informed public who would benchmark their home government's performance against the best in the world. Arguments that we are already doing better than before will be increasingly lame. Our people will ask: but have you really done your best? Have you made the best use of the taxes we entrust you to spend? And at the end of the day they will ask: are you still fit to govern? How to reform our public institutions to successfully meet at least a reasonable degree of these aspirations will be the genuine test for all governments in the 21st century.

Third, coming back to a more micro level of governance, traditional public institutions are largely locked into rigid hierarchical structures that would be unfit for the new world that we are now entering. They foster bureaucratic behavior at the expense of speed and human touch. They cover inefficiencies under the disguise of stability and collective responsibility. They have a life of their own when everyone inside it feel overwhelmed by complexities, not so much in problem solving but in just knowing how to operate the institution itself! Business have been transforming themselves to flatter and more agile information age organizations. Few governments, if any, are doing this or are even attempting to do this.

Lastly, civil servants are going to find it more difficult to keep up with all these changes. Employment and retraining agencies will have a hard time trying to retrain our undereducated and aging workers to suit the needs of information age employers. Social workers will have to struggle with the growing problems of broken marriages and broken families, not to mention the global problem of widening wealth disparities causing relative poverty to pockets of the population. Financial market supervisors will find it increasingly tough going to catch up with new and innovative trading vehicles. And of course our telecommunication regulators will have to prepare for overseeing a market that changes once every few months.

These factors call for fundamental reforms to public sector institutions. They must be made more open and permeable so that outside talents may be absorbed. To continue to rely completely on home grown expertise will do our people a major disservice, for the pace of change is such that we simply cannot have enough of the up-to-date expertise even with the best will and best training institution money can buy. Public institutions must be prepared to pay well for the good people but only keep the good people. The days of life time security in tenure have to go with the 20th century. Public institutions must be prepared to look for the help of and to get into partnership with the private sector to make our service delivery more cost efficient. Public institutions must above all be subject to tough rules of public accountability to uphold the standard of probity and cost effectiveness. Many governments are now taking steps to do so. And so has Hong Kong.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have taken quite a portion of your valuable morning not to provide insights and answers to these tough questions. These I leave largely to you as there are more experience and wisdom in this floor than I can ever master within our government. I have highlighted my vision of the exciting new world that we are entering into. A new world that will create plentiful opportunities, that will enhance mankind's living standard significantly. And yet it is a new world that will bring about as yet unpredictable changes to the present world order and significant impact on how governments of the day are going to operate.

I see three major forces at work that will guarantee worldwide changes for decades: first, the rapidly reshaping world economic order; second, the information revolution; and third, the multiplying social conflicts. They will put immense pressure on human institutions, in particular public sector institutions.

I listed four major pressure points that governments will have to face: first, the yield of an increasing degree of sovereignty to international institutions; second, the need to match the rising expectations of a well informed public; third, the challenge of having to reorganize our bureaucracies to make them more responsive and service friendly; and fourth, the urgency of having to reform the public service to make them better able to cope with and hopefully to master change. All these are tall orders and call for top level determination, political resolve as well as public support to implement.

And that is why it is important for international brain storming sessions like this one to take place, for we need the wisdom of more than just our home population to face these challenges which result from the rapid globalization of economies and increasingly of civilizations. That is what it should be. And that is what we are all here for today and tomorrow. Thank you.

End/Monday, January 10, 2000

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