One of the less widely acknowledged major constitutional changes in Hong Kong following the 1997 reunification was the introduction of the ministerial system in mid-2002. In May 2008, Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen added two more layers of politically appointed officials - undersecretaries and political assistants.
The public, used to a government run by civil servants during the colonial regime, has not been totally at ease with the new political appointees whose role is perceived to be ambiguous. Critics even fault some as being overpaid political novices.
In conventional political theory, there are two branches to the system: the executive government, which is elected to deliver its policy commitments and is held accountable for governance performance; and the permanent civil service, which is responsible for the faithful and efficient implementation of ministerial decisions. Both sides have distinct roles and expertise in governance, and recruit talent separately.
Under the Westminster model, the civil service maintains political neutrality in serving the government of the day, offering independent, professional and 'free, frank and fearless' policy advice. Even in the US, where more than 4,000 positions undergo a change of personnel within the federal public service each time a new president assumes office, there has been an equal emphasis on the administration 'speaking truth to power'.
In their 1981 classic Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies, Joel Aberbach, Robert Putnam and Bert Rockman traced the evolution of the relationship between political principals and administrative officials from the early phase of the separation of policymaking and implementation. They found more fusion - with both sides sharing policymaking responsibilities and powers, though with a different focus - between 'political rationality' and 'administrative rationality', and between engaging diffused interests and more organised ones.
By the 1980s, such distinctions had blurred, as ministers also sought to 'manage' while senior bureaucrats were subject to politicisation. In recent years, across Western democracies, even within the Westminster family, political staff have emerged as a third force in addition to ministers and administrative officials, adding new dimensions to the constitutional design.