LettersWhy Hong Kong civil servants are answerable only to the city

Hong Kong taxpayers fund the civil service, which Article 99 of the Basic Law specifies is responsible to the local government

The service’s reputation for professionalism and political neutrality was built over decades

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Hong Kong civil servants return to office in Admiralty on May 4, after working from home for more than a month as part of measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections in the city. Photo: Nora Tam

Published: 6:25am, 10 Jun 2020Updated: 6:25am, 10 Jun 2020

The raison d’être of “one country, two systems” is that mainland China and Hong Kong do not share the same value system. Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip Tak-kuen’s recent remark, that our civil servants must also consider China when performing their duty, is a direct attack on the city’s much cherished values and traditions (“Civil service chief tells staff they serve country, not just Hong Kong”, June 7).

There are many reasons Nip’s remarks are problematic. For starters, Article 99 of the Basic Law specifies that Hong Kong’s public servants are “responsible to the government of the Hong Kong SAR”. This is precisely because the mainland government has different values.

There is also a more self-apparent reason for Article 99. Hong Kong civil servants are entirely paid for by Hong Kong taxpayers. Just as an employee works for the employer who pays his salary, it only makes sense for the city’s civil servants to answer to the people of Hong Kong only.

It bodes ill for Hong Kong to have a politically appointed top government official flouting the Basic Law in public.

Yet, more importantly, Mr Nip’s remark puts Hong Kong civil servants’ trustworthy image in jeopardy. Hongkongers have grown accustomed to trusting civil servants to be, on a whole, professional, objective, impartial and politically neutral. These are the core values spelt out in the Civil Service Code.

We expect civil servants to abide by time-honoured precedents and written policy, rather than to exercise their own political judgments or promote their own political agenda when performing their tasks.