SARS and the Limits of the Hong Kong SAR Administrative State

This article reviews the crisis-management experience of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) administrative state in handling the SARS outbreak in the spring 2003. The slow and ineffective response of the SAR government was the result of a mixture of factors: lack of crisis mentality, overemphasis on technocratic rationality in decision making, fragmentation of the healthcare institutions, and an inability to mobilize social and health resources. The lack of political leadership also made it difficult for the administrative state to transcend institutional constraints to mete out an effective response in a time of crisis. Many of these problems were rooted in the nature of Hong Kong as an administrative state, which calls for more fundamental reforms on top of administrative reforms in health care institutions.