Chapter 2: In Search of Trust and�Legitimacy: The Political Trajectory of Hong Kong as Part of China

In the 1980s and 1990s, the impending return of Hong Kong to China by 1997 had triggered a major confidence crisis in Hong Kong. A new logic of governance would have to be created to substitute the then colonial logic which emphasized administrative efficiency and the rule of convenience, a logic that the local population had implicitly accepted out of political acquiescence. However, the path towards a new Hong Kong as a special administrative region (SAR) had not been accompanied by the proper decolonization and democratization of the governance system. Old wine was put into new bottles. The political order as enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law was largely been a continuation (and at most a re-institutionalization) of the ancien regime.