Description

State-Business relations play a significant part in the study of politics of Hong Kong. After the handover in 1997, controversies about the so-called “State-Business collusion” created political turmoil, although few commentators have knowledge about State-Business relations. This is also a significant issue in political theories, as political theorists disagreed about the degree of state autonomy under business influence. In the scenario of Hong Kong, while some scholars argued that the polity of Hong Kong is a synarchy of bureaucrats and business elites, some suggested that it is a bureaucratic state. Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to provide conclusive answers to these debates.

To figure out how the state interacted with the business sector, we would need to measure the relative power of these two parties. The study tried to estimate the decision-making power of the state and the business sector using the technique of social network analysis. The methodology has been used in the study of politics for decades, and it enables analyses to be conducted while official data are limited. Following the conclusion of Burt's (2005) network studies on social capital, the sum of brokerage and closure of social actors within a social network was used as the indicator of power. In the study, Executive Councilors were treated as representatives of the state or the business sector within the central decision-making body of Hong Kong, and their brokerage and closure were scored. The sum of the scores was used to estimate the relative power of the state and the business.

It was found that business influence on politics, after a period of state-business synarchy, had declined significantly since late 1980s. Although businessmen dominated official posts in the government in the first few years after the handover, their rule remained ineffective, and bureaucrats resumed control after a series of legitimacy crises. The decline of business influence was associated with the fragmentation of business community, which was a result of changing economic structures, fluctuations in Sino-British relations, and Beijing's united front work towards the business sector.