THE OFFICE OF Ma Ngok, associate professor in the Department of Government and Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, isn't decorated with the wall charts of government structures, the Legislative Council, or pods of social activism you might expect to find. Instead, there's a huge poster of Manchester United.
It turns out that the author of the recently published Political Development in Hong Kong - State, Political Society, and Civil Society, which reviews the political development of Hong Kong before and after 1997, is also a keen soccer fan and has even written a book on the game.
Ma's latest work is a rather more academic tome - examining state-society relations during the past 20 years and breaking down the different government institutions and political parties. The account of Hong Kong's recent political history is comprehensive, if somewhat depressing, and a good read for anyone interested in Hong Kong at the top and grass-roots levels, and the conflict between government and society. It puts into context key clashes between the public and government - for example, the debacle over Article 23 or the attempts to prevent Link Reit shares going on the stock exchange.
The outlook isn't positive, says Ma. Without considerable institutional reform, Hongkongers may find themselves living in a city where they can't express themselves politically, and the frustration and demonstrations will grow. He explains the slow growth of democracy in Hong Kong and why there's a governance crisis, caused in part by the rigidity of a system borrowed from colonial days. Political society is underdeveloped, but the roots are in Hong Kong's colonial past, he says.
Ma decided to write the book after the 2002 re-election of chief executive Tung Chee-hwa. 'I was sitting in Cable Television's studio doing live commentary and I was struck by all these celebrities queuing up to praise Tung,' he says. 'It didn't strike me that that was the sentiment of the public - and certainly not in the newsroom. A lot of Tung's comments and those by the celebrities were met by jeers in the newsroom.'
Added to that, Tung wasn't elected by the people, and surveys showed that only 18 per cent of people approved of him. 'It's a situation that's novel to Hong Kong,' Ma says. 'Most non-democracies wouldn't tolerate that. In a lot of authoritarian countries the government would try to control the media.'