Tung Chee-hwa will be remembered as a leader whose real problem lay in policy-making and knowing how to exercise the powers that he had been given. He blamed his inability to govern effectively on the British, claiming they had left behind all sorts of problems, including a 'bubble economy', overspending on recurrent expenditure and on a non-compliant civil service that did not listen to his command.
His assessment of the economy was wrong. Hong Kong had a property market bubble before 1997, but not a 'bubble economy' as a whole. This was a serious mistake because it showed that Mr Tung knew much less about the economy than he thought he did, and his outlook influenced his decisions on economic policies.
Hong Kong's real economic strength lies in its external economy - with the city playing the role of a service centre to the manufacturing businesses across the border. Yet, Mr Tung was always tempted by vested interests who kept saying that the government needed to offer cheap land to bring manufacturing back here. Another problem with Mr Tung's vision of economic development was his attraction for grand schemes, such as Cyberport and the West Kowloon Cultural District. Despite loud protests, the public remains uncomfortable with these arrangements because they appear to favour certain businesses or business sectors.
Blaming the colonial administration for overspending was disingenuous. The truth was that it was Mr Tung who put in place a huge recurrent spending programme in 1998 that keeps expenditure high. The worrying aspect is whether Mr Tung understood the longer-term impact of his spending spree.
Mr Tung's solution to his perception of an intransigent civil service was to create a ministerial system. At the start of his second term in July 2002, he replaced civil servants with political appointees to head ministerial posts. However, the new system was so poorly thought out and hastily implemented that, within three months, it ran into trouble with the penny stocks incident, where one of the new ministers was shown to have been unready for high office. Since then, several others have, one after another, shown themselves to be less than competent.
Now, three years into the ministerial system, it is clear that it has not produced better decision makers or an improved decision-making process. However, what it has done is weakened the executive, with Mr Tung having to pay the ultimate price, taking the blame for an ineffective government. Perhaps he may feel some embarrassment to have claimed that his leadership strength was in his policies.
