Government Capacity and the Hong Kong Civil Service. By John P. Burns. [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvi+468 pp. ISBN 0-19-590597-0.]

John Burns has written an exhaustively researched and highly important book for scholars with a particular interest in Chinese politics and, more broadly, for the fields of comparative politics and public management. Burns examines the contributions of the civil service to government capacity in Hong Kong. His focus is the crucial post-1997 period, which presents him with a number of interesting analytical issues. First, post-1997 Hong Kong continues to lack the political institutions linking citizen preferences to government policy outcomes. In this context, the civil service takes on enormous political importance: it identifies and proposes solutions to community problems, roles that would be performed by politicians and political parties in a liberal democracy. Secondly, although post-1997 Hong Kong has significant autonomy, it is a local government, essentially subject to the rule of Communist leaders in Beijing. This raises interesting problems of relations between centre and locality. Finally, and not least of all, the Hong Kong economy suffered a significant decline in the late 1990s. This challenged the performancebased legitimacy of the government and placed new pressures on it to reform the civil service to strengthen government capacity. Evaluation of these reforms is an important contribution of this volume.Burns examines the civil service from a public management perspective, both describing policies and analysing actual practices, the latter with the use of interviews, surveys and case studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong government capacity was high. Economic growth was rapid, unemployment was low, and public support for the government was strong, based on apparently successful performance.