This dissertation examines changes in Hong Kong’s food safety institutions using an historical institutional approach. Hong Kong has faced enormous challenges in food safety over the last two decades. The avian flu crisis in 1997 and the malachite green crisis in 2005 were the two most notable examples. Both crises were recipes for institutional change. There was drastic reform in 2000 to form a unified food safety authority, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, to replace the old legacy of municipal councils and municipal service departments. The established municipal councils failed to sustain themselves and the government replaced them with new institutions. Moreover, in 2005, the government proposed a new Food Safety, Inspection and Quarantine Department to overcome failings in food safety. These changes and reforms developed in variance from what could have been expected using theories of punctuated equilibrium and critical juncture (which emphasize exogenous shocks). My investigation suggests that we should not just focus on critical junctures and exogenous shocks but also study the processes and events outside these events. We cannot take it for granted that a significant exogenous shock will automatically result in institutional change without exploring the role they play and the mechanisms involved. Other endogenous processes or gradual changes may disrupt the mechanisms of institutional reproduction. My research also suggests that the form of institutional change cannot be predicted based on critical junctures and exogenous events. Focusing on the features of political context and institutional properties, we can understand how it is possible to switch between different modes to fit the prevailing institutional and political context. Political appointees and senior civil servants, as change agents, need to focus on political barriers in the legislature before any institutional change in government can eventually succeed. Without major change in Hong Kong’s political system and landscape, there is less likelihood of introducing controversial policy changes, including institutional change. Change agents are more likely to make use of different modes of institutional change, such as layering and conversion, in order to circumvent political barriers and the stickiness of old institutions. / published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Authoritarian China provides a unique context to explore resistance strategies. For one thing, it is alert to both institutionalized resistance and non-institutionalized one. For another, China is different from traditional authoritarian state due to the change of state legitimacy. It now gains support from the public by economic performance rather than ideology control, making it tolerant of resistance claiming for economic requests. Previous literatures have discovered different types of peasant resistance. However, they fail to highlight the diversity in peasant resistance that different types co-exist. Furthermore, prior studies seldom focus on analyzing the rationale behind peasant behaviors. This thesis examines the state–society relationship by exploring peasant resistance to land conflicts in rural China. Trust in the state is an important intermediate variable that shapes peasant responses to state policy. Through 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 45 land-lost peasants in 2 villages, the study finds an interplay between peasant trust and behavior toward state policy. More specifically, the way people trust the central government leads to different resistance strategies. This study uncovers four types of trust in the central government and shows how they lead to specific social actions in terms of intention and capacity: Justice Bao (morally good intention and large capacity), Judge (legally just and large capacity), Clay Bodhisattva (good intention and small capacity), Monster (bad intention and large capacity). Accordingly, peasants develop four types of behavioral patterns based on the trust types: state-dependent and norm-based, state-dependent and policy-based, self-dependent and policy-based, self-dependent and norm-based. It also investigates the opposite process of how those actions lead to a reshaping of trust in the state. In other words, this study places the evolution of trust in a cyclic lifetime learning model where trust shapes behavior and is in turn reshaped by the consequences of those behaviors. This study contributes to the existing literature in three main aspects. Firstly, it identifies that peasant trust in the central government is diverse rather than monolithic as found by current literatures. Secondly, it displays the connection between trust in the state and corresponding behavioral patterns towards the state policy. Thirdly, it enriches the current literature on trust by indicating that trust evolves in a lifetime learning process. It on one hand influences peasants’ behavioral patterns; on the other is reshaped by the consequences of behaviors. / published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This paper studies the effect of government measures on Hong Kong’s property market. Government intervention appeared to describe the involvement and engagement of government in property market. Nowadays, the problems of supply-demand imbalance exist in Hong Kong’s property market, leading to high property price. The government is liable to intervene in the market in order to maintain the stability of economy and society. For demand-side measures, the government introduced three property cooling measures on stamp duty taxation adjustments and successfully stabilized the overheated residential property market. For supply-side measures, the government regularly initiated the role of Annual Land Sale Programme. The resumption of Home Ownership Scheme (HOS) in 2011 also increased the supply of housing to middle-income households and youngers to fulfill their aspiration of homeownership. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect public responses on the above government measures and results showed that most of the respondents supported the above government measures. / published_or_final_version / Housing Management / Master / Master of Housing Management

This thesis analyses the construction of the risk environment with the emergence of a harm reduction policy in Macao, which, I propose acts as a regulatory regime to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic among injecting drug users (IDUs). On the one hand, the policy has endeavoured to address the various levels of the risk environment on the IDUs; on the other hand, it is also portrayed as a bio-political project situated in the history of drug control and public health surveillance in Macao. With harm reduction imperatives such as the methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) and needle and syringe programme (NSP), addict citizens are refashioned and made up to be a particular form of drug using subject – health conscious citizens who rationally and calculatingly perform in the use of drugs in a controlled manner in order to minimise drug-related harm to themselves as well as the general society. With the conferral of neoliberal subjectivity, they are offered political benefits in symbolic and material resources, such as recognition, trust and legitimate status, to obtain welfare. However, the tradeoffs are their freedom and mobility in being constrained by the methadone treatment, which is metaphorically represented as “liquid handcuffs”. The study utilises ethnographic research methods, such as video-recording, photo-taking, field observations and in-depth interviews, as its data sources. The data analysis is informed by a thematic approach, especially discourse and content analyses. Inspired by risk governmentality, IDUs are not passively subjugated to the surveillance of the treatment regime. Contrarily, they actively display modest amounts of agency, which they assert themselves by developing various streetwise risk strategies to handle overdosing. A code of ethics with regards to moral economy and responsibility are cultivated in the drug user community under the impacts of harm reduction (expert) discourses. In the face of entrenched double stigma around drug addiction and HIV/AIDS which shape their risk environment and spoiled identity as junkies, the drug users in this study endeavour to innovate strategies of resistance with the use of harm reduction measures to properly manage their spoiled identity and reclaim their citizenship. This gives them more freedom, autonomy and pleasure in their life experiences through the negotiation process that is embedded in the risk environment. The theoretical implications of this study include: the integration of risk governmentality with risk environment, and an assessment of harm reduction imperatives, including their effect as a newer form of governance on IDUs, which might conceal the material constraints that they face. In short, harm reduction requires a critical focus on the benevolence of biopolitical projects, such as the MMT and NSP, which, while not intentional, might legitimise the repressive measures directed at drug users – who ultimately are not willing to trade their freedom to take part in ―healthy self-care‖ projects under a neoliberal drug policy. / published_or_final_version / Sociology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Not available / text

Not available / text

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

published_or_final_version / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning