No, minister

Did no one in government consider the nationality of deputy ministers and political assistants to be important? The administration says the Basic Law does not require deputy ministers and political assistants to be Chinese nationals; that only applies to ministers. When the constitution was drafted, these new layers were not envisaged. Indeed, the Basic Law was based on the former colonial model where the most senior officials played both an administrative and a political role, and it required only a thin layer of them to be Chinese nationals in the post-1997 structure.

That was a sensible move. There are many civil servants with foreign nationalities. The chief executive, referred to as 'Mr Passports' after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, administered the scheme that dished out British passports to 50,000 families in Hong Kong. So he knows better than anyone the existence of a sizeable group of civil servants with foreign nationalities, including those who have also gained citizenship from other countries.

If the deputies and assistants had joined the civil service, no questions would have been asked. The issue here is that they are political appointees. Their role is clearly to work as politicians, to assist the ministers, although the government has yet to spell out their job descriptions except in the most general terms.

The ministers, deputies and assistants are, in fact, a group of appointees who accepted an offer from the chief executive to work closely with him. They will obviously be in the political limelight and, if they have political ambition, it is not a bad place to be. Each of the deputies and assistants must have had the support of the relevant minister since they have to work closely together. Perhaps the process was simple - since a new layer of deputies and assistants had to be created, ministers probably looked at who they thought could assist them. A few are tested as administrators, since they come from the civil service, and can be expected to perform as they did as civil servants within the minister's office. The rest are untested as politicians but, hopefully, can add some private-sector experience. We will all have to wait to see how useful they are in improving the politics of delivering good governance.

Is this a good way to groom political talent? The architects of the appointment system obviously think so. The usual route, where elections produce the government of the day, is via the party system. But the development of parties in Hong Kong is hindered by disconnecting elections from holding power. This is why legislators, who are elected, will always feel short-changed. Even the 'government friendly' parties are unhappy, since they have to toe the line but also suffer the ignominy of being easily sidelined by those who hold the positions of power.

The issue of nationality would be less important if the notion of 'patriotism' wasn't constantly being used to challenge people's loyalty. The left-wing camp complains the loudest against people they claim are connected to foreign countries. This is why the position of deputy minister Greg So Kam-leung, a former vice-chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, has been the focus of discussion. Who would have thought a leading light of the most patriotic organ would be a non-Chinese national?