Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAGOVEGovernance0952-18952005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.April 2005182257282ArticlesADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
The Politics of Administrative Reforms in Asia:
Paradigms and Legacies, Paths and Diversities1
ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG*
Many Asian governments have embarked on administrative reforms of one
kind or another, engaging in rhetoric that resonates with the global
paradigms of “new public management” and “good governance.” This
article seeks to understand Asian administrative reforms against the
background of international influence, policy diffusion, domestic politics,
institutional dynamics, and administrative traditions and legacies. It is
impossible to capture the whole range of national reform types within any
neat and tidy Asian paradigm, but some common strands of national reform
paths in the region can still be traced. Different problems and failures are
found to be addressed by Asian reforms, reflecting diverse motives and
resulting in varied outcomes. The “old” public administration regime has
largely coexisted with the “new” public management approaches and tools.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, Asian countries have been riding increasingly on the
global movement of public sector reforms. Since the 1997 Asian economic
crisis, which caused doubt to be cast on the validity of the previous “East
Asian miracle” thesis (World Bank), there have been calls for institutional
reforms in some Asian countries to cope with the challenge of globalization and catch up with some recognized “best practices” (Asian Development Bank [ADB] 1999, 2000; Schiavo-Campo and Sundaram). Countries
relying on the assistance of international organizations or developed
donor countries have become particularly prone to imposed conditions
of aid in the form of requirements on specific reform targets and
strategies.
Apart from economic and fiscal pressures, however, domestic political
changes, including regime change, democratization, and the collapse of
the preexisting political order, have also resulted in a new articulation of
governance that underlies new institutional arrangements, in addition to
the innate influence of national administrative traditions such as the
colonial, military, or imperial legacies of some countries. Asian administrative reforms are often closely linked to political reforms arising from
decolonization and nation building. There are also “socialist” countries
such as China and Vietnam that have embarked on paths of economic
*City University of Hong Kong
Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 18, No. 2,
April 2005 (pp. 257–282). © 2005 Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148,
USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK. ISSN 0952-1895
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ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
and administrative transformations because of systemic reform and ideological revision.
Different paradigms are found to have impacted on Asian institutional
reforms. Two notable ones are the “new public management” (NPM) and
“good governance” models. NPM is generally held to have informed
administrative reforms in many developed Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (Manning, 5). Other parts
of the world are also exposed to NPM’s impact (Haque 2001a; McCourt
and Minogue; Turner 1998, 2002). The “good governance” objectives are
advocated by regional and international organizations (e.g., ADB 1995,
2000). Asian institutional reforms are not isolated from such global waves
of public sector reforms. The questions, however, are: Do Asian reforms
conform to what is generally regarded as a global paradigm of administrative change or reinvention, or do they assume a different institutional
logic? By extension, do most Asian countries conform to a common
regional path that can be contrasted with, say, Western European or North
American methods?
In posing such questions, there are two caveats. First, reform diversities
prevail even among more advanced nations pioneering the current global
wave of reforms (Cheung 1997; Christensen and Laegreid; Common
2001). As Christopher Pollitt (2000, 185) observed, “path dependent”
explanations fit public management reform rather well. Some countries
(such as Germany) have found it more politically and legally difficult to
change central administrative structures; and not all OECD countries
shared the same past in the form of a “traditional bureaucracy.” In many
countries, more autonomous state bodies existed (Clarke and Newman).
Similarly, Asian national situations cannot be casually lumped together
into a regional pattern. Second, Asian reforms are noted for their features
of nation building and state-capacity enhancement, which have been
motivated by national politics as much as by external inspirations. However, the “political” nature of such reforms cannot be stretched too far;
after all, reforms in most countries are not devoid of political motives and
calculations (Kettl), not to mention the domestic need to build and sustain
political coalitions for change. Overgeneralization is as much an analytical risk as overplaying local uniqueness.
EXPLAINING ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS
Pan-Asian studies of administrative reforms are scant partly because of
such conceptual hurdles. A few recent ones are Mark Turner (2002) and
Barbara Nunberg (2002) on Southeast Asia, and Shamsul Haque (2001b)
on South Asia, and Anthony Cheung and Ian Scott on Asian reform
paradoxes and paradigms. Most normative studies attribute the need for
reform to either inadequacies of existing administrative systems or the
impact of external or global best-practice reform models. Domestic political or popular demands for better government performance are often a
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
259
TABLE 1
Governance Challenges To Be Addressed by Reform Actions in Asia
Subregion/Type
Governance Challenge
Former centrally planned
economies
• Overextension and
overcentralization of
the state
• Lack of appropriate
legal framework
and skills
• Greater reliance on
the market
• Very weak
administrative
system
Least-developed countries
South Asia
Southeast Asia
• State tries to do too
much given limited
resources and
capabilities
• Regulatory
ossification
• “Crony capitalism”
• Weak checks and
balances in public–
private relations
• Barriers to
competition
Priority Action
• Encourage carefully
timed and tuned
process of
decentralization
• Extend the scope and
accelerate the pace of
administrative reform
• Encourage exposure to
good practices
• Better matching of role
of the state to its
capability
• Cut red tape
• Encourage
administrative renewal
• Improve openness,
reciprocity, and checks
on administrative
discretion
• Strengthen corporate
governance systems
• Encourage competition
Source: ADB (1999, 18).
common factor. ADB (1999) has identified different sets of governance
problems facing subgroups of Asian countries ranging from an overextended state, weak administrative system, to cronyism, and proposed
priority actions ranging from decentralization, cutting red tape, to corporate governance reforms (see Table 1).
The Global “New Public Management”
A common explanation of administrative reforms at the global level is
NPM, the substance of which is well articulated in the literature (e.g.,
Hood 1991; Lane; McLaughlin, Osborne, and Ferlie; Pollitt and
Bouchaert). As reform prescription, NPM represents a critique of the
traditional model of public administration based on state bureaucracy
(Dunleavy and Hood; Hughes) and of the general failure of government—expressed as an unresponsive but invasive state, overextended
state, or private-interest state captured by privileged groups (Minogue).
Because of NPM’s growing international currency, it is easy to understand
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ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
its impact on Asian and other countries in the newly developed or developing world, which feel the urge to follow the latest international “best
practice.” Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell saw public-management
changes as heavily driven by “mimetic” processes. These are in addition
to policy learning and international organizations that promote ideas
about “best practice” and benchmarks on “good governance,” such as the
World Bank and OECD.
Supply-Side Explanations
A supply-side explanation of administrative reform in Asia, and indeed
elsewhere, may thus rest on the claim that certain ideas and practices
proving to be effective (such as NPM) are being spread or “exported” by
reform pioneers and leaders to the follower/learner/imitator countries.
Such an exporting process can be logically sustained by policy transfer
and policy diffusion theorizations. However, the force of such supply-side
explanation is not without conditions or bounds.
First, there is a limit to the internationalization of policies. While convergence is a powerful rhetorical theme, helping to give an added legitimating force to national reformers by “running with the herd” (Hood
2000, 203), any diffusion, transfer, or learning of “international” policy
has still to be distilled by national politics. The policy idea may be international in origin, but the actual policy-making process in any country
always remains local. Second, a global reform paradigm, even in its place
of origin, may not represent a single fixed set of reform instruments or
strategies. In the case of NPM, it embraces a whole range of measures and
strategies lumped together for government reformers to pick and choose.
Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouchaert (Ch. 8) categorized these as the
strategies of four “Ms”—maintaining, modernizing, marketizing, and
minimizing (the public sector).1 The actual strategic choice is determined
by national conditions and the political agenda, as well as by motives and
preferences of decision makers, resulting in distinct national reform styles
representing diverse philosophies (Kettl, 62). Third, NPM reforms are
noted more for their divergence than for uniformity (Cheung 1997; Hood
1996; Ingraham). NPM convergence may mean quite different things—
talk, decisions, actions, and results (Pollitt 2001). There is a lot more
information around the world on discursive and probably decisional
convergence, yet far less evidence on practice and results convergence
(Pollitt 2001).
While NPM (or the equivalent reinvention agenda in the U.S.) seems
the global fashion, influencing the thinking of many leaders and reformers in developing nations, some critics, skeptical of the universality of
NPM, have pointed to themes of reform unrelated to NPM, such as
capacity building, control of corruption, political decentralization, and
public empowerment (Minogue, Polidano, and Hulme; Polidano and
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261
Hulme 1999). Talking of a post-NPM reform agenda, they have emphasized the importance of civil society as the source of push for better
governance (Polidano and Hulme 2001). This marks two different
approaches to public sector and institutional reforms—one managerially
oriented under NPM and the other more socially rooted under the “good
governance” notion.
Governance may be defined in terms of a wide variety of values that
contribute toward enhancing government’s capacity to deliver good performance to meet citizen needs and expectations, such as accountability,
participation, transparency, and predictability (ADB 1995, 7–13; Commonwealth Secretariat 2000, 7–9). As a concept, governance goes beyond
the issue of public management to address the more fundamental question of how to strengthen government and other institutions in society to
help solve problems and meet challenges, entailing government–market,
government–society, and intragovernment relationships. Under the good
governance paradigm, public management reform is necessary in many
developing countries whose public sector has been tainted by “uneven
revenue collection, poor expenditure control and management of a
bloated civil service, [and] a large para-statal sector” (Commonwealth
Secretariat 2000, 11; also ADB 1995, 26–33). State institutions have to be
reformed to make them more efficient, accountable, and transparent. Civil
service reforms are needed to restore the morale and integrity of the
public service through merit-based recruitment and promotion.
Since the 1990s, especially after the outbreak of the Asian economic
crisis, “good governance” has become a mission of reform for the region
as a whole (see Table 1). Those countries that receive external aid have to
toe the line of international organizations, some of which advocate neoliberal governance reforms that resonate NPM. The post-Asian crisis view
has been that some Asian governments’ close ties with business and active
intervention in the economy were the source of corruption and crony
capitalism, which in turn accounted for the East and Southeastern Asian
bubbles (ADB 1999; Bhatta; also Quah). The “good governance” approach
is of particular appeal to South Asian countries where formally democratic political institutions fail to function effectively and the
government’s performance in economic management has been erratic
(Huque, 1290).
Demand-Side Explanations
Why countries adopt or borrow certain reform strategies and models
depends on both the normative appeal of such strategies and models as
well as the reform agenda-setting process conditioned by national needs
and political demands. For example, it is generally held that bureaucratic
and political choices, in addition to rational and ideological considerations, shaped the actual NPM policy decisions, for example, bureaushaping strategies of public service managers (Dunleavy 1986, 1991),
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self-destruction of the old public administration institutions (Hood 1994,
141), and the “public service bargain” between politicians and bureaucrats (Hood 2002). Kuno Schedler and Isabella Proeller also argued that
NPM reforms were initiated in reaction to current political challenges in
European local governments. Donald Kettl (67) observed that most
reform discourses began with a flawed premise—that management
reform is most fundamentally about management, so much so that discussions quickly became “enmeshed in arcane debates about the relative
value of output and outcome measures, strategies for culture change, and
the importance of reengineering versus ‘soft’ people-based approaches.”
He argued that elected leaders did not pursue management reform for its
own sake but because they believed it served a broader political purpose.
Administrative reform is also about political reform—how to strengthen
the ability and capacity of elected officials to produce results.
William Hojnacki identified three sources and patterns of politicization
of administrative reform, namely internally (bureaucracy)-driven, politician-driven, and society-driven politicizations. In the same vein, Myungjae Moon and Patricia Ingraham (78) conceptualized administrative
reform within a “political nexus triad” (PNT), whereby reform became “a
product of the politicization process, in which the three PNT actors
[politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens] communicate and bargain their
political interest regarding government performance (function) and the
administrative system (structure).” They observed a bureaucracy-led
PNT in Japan, a party-dominant PNT in China, and a president-led PNT
in South Korea. Reviewing the adaptation of the NPM menu by Southeast
Asian countries, Mark Turner (2002) detected both “enthusiastic” diners
(Singapore and Malaysia) and “cautious” diners (the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia), while the rest (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) knew
little of NPM. Both the source of demand (and motives) for administrative
reform and the degree of enthusiasm for particular reform models vary
within the region.
SOME COMMON THEMES IN EVALUATING ASIAN
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS
Asian Political Economy and a Strong Bureaucracy
As an economic crisis hit Asia in 1997, Paul Krugman (27) remarked, “If
there is one thing that believers in an Asian system admire, it is the way
Asian governments promote specific industries and technologies; this is
supposed to explain their economies’ soaring efficiency.” The Asian crisis
has provided some counter-theses to this assumption, including his own
theory of preparation to account for Asia’s previous rapid growth. However, many of the features of the Asian (more specifically, East Asian)
approach still persist, including adherence to the fundamentals of macroeconomic management, reliance on a bureaucracy able to conceive and
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263
implement a “strong state,” and commitment to long-run development.
As Shahid Yusuf (7) put it, “a circumscribed dirigisme yielded good
results on balance because of an overriding commitment to rapid and
efficient development, combined with the ability of a strong state to
abandon initiatives that were seen to be failing.”
This is not the place to diagnose the Asian models of economic development, but it is important to recognize that nation building, steering
(and very often directing) the economy, and the predominant status and
role of the bureaucracy have always been keys to administrative organization and reforms in the region. For some countries, following regime
change or transition in the 1990s, and the rising expectations of their
population, better responsiveness to citizen demands and making administration more transparent, accountable, and less susceptible to corruption
have become added objectives. The economic setback unfolded by the
Asian crisis and the challenge of globalization have triggered new
demands for adjustments and actions. However, taking up reform models
to streamline administration and the public sector is not the same as
diluting the role and weakening the capacity of the state. There are certainly some elements of NPM and good governance on the region’s
administrative reform agenda, but the fundamental nature of Asian states
and public sectors remain essentially intact.
Many Asian states are highly interventionist. Both China and Vietnam,
still under communist rule, were previously state-planned and now statedirected marketizing economies. In Japan, considered by Chalmers
Johnson as the model of developmental state, and most Asian “little
dragons” (South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore), a strong bureaucracy
with an active interventionist industrial policy was credited for achieving
outstanding economic performance (the “governed market” model
according to Robert Wade). Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan also
observed that the governments of high-growth East Asian economies
shared “a common advantage in adopting state-corporatist solutions:
every one of them already possessed well-organized bureaucracies with
established traditions.” A rich literature exists on government–industry
relations and state capacity in East Asia (e.g., Brodsgaard and Young;
Evans; Wade; Weiss). Arguably, Hong Kong has stood out as an exception
to that model, providing seemingly reverse proof of a successful freemarket, noninterventionist economy. However, it depends on how intervention (or nonintervention) is interpreted. As J. R. Schiffer pointed out,
the colonial government in Hong Kong was active in regulative controls
and involved extensively in social policy, using land revenue instead of
heavy taxation to finance government welfare. After the reversion to
Chinese sovereignty, a new form of state interventionism has emerged as
a result of the political institutionalization of economic functional interests (Cheung 2000).
Outside the “governed-market” sphere, other Asian countries have
also emphasized state-led development and close government–business
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links. For example, India, despite being a market economy, has long
practiced economic planning and has been criticized as implementing
“command capitalism” (Jain, 1318) through extensive state regulative
controls of industry and cumbersome licensing schemes, partly due to
political and bureaucratic corruption. In Malaysia, the adoption of the
New Economic Policy in 1971 as a blueprint to reduce interracial economic differences in favor of the indigenous Malays (bumiputera) led to
government stepping into a wide range of commercial and industrial
activities. This “government-in-business” strategy was enforced through
setting up public enterprises and an expanded ownership of publicly
listed companies. The 1983 “Malaysia Incorporated” policy aimed to
establish an active and cooperative relationship between the private and
public sectors in formulating and implementing policies in order to boost
the development and industrialization efforts of government (Common
2003, 175–176). Both Indonesia and Thailand have had a long history of
close affinity and institutionalized integration between military-based
governmental power and private business interests, to the extent of breeding crony capitalism (RIPA, Chapters 2 and 3). Even among states performing poorly in the quest for development, this has not disturbed the
popular belief that it is the government’s task to produce development
(Turner 2002, 1506).
State-led or -dominated economic development in Asian countries is
not consistent with the private sector-led ideological underpinnings of
neoliberal institutional reforms advocated by some international agencies or the NPM-guided reforms now taking center stage globally, which
see the private sector as the principal answer to resource and welfare
allocation. Despite adopting NPM-like administrative reforms, some
countries, notably Malaysia during the Asian economic crisis, continue
to reject the neoliberal economic prescriptions. The urge for less government in favor of more market is less innate than what the official reform
program or rhetoric suggests. The size of bureaucracy might have been
trimmed and its hierarchical structure streamlined under the modernizing agenda, but the prominence of the state (and its bureaucracy) has
persisted.
Administrative Reform Trajectories and Constraints
Most Asian countries have legacies of colonial rule, military rule, or oneparty authoritarianism or dictatorship. As such, they all share a strong
tradition of bureaucratic rule. Bureaucrats governed polities have
induced essentially a paternalistic, authoritarian (even militarized), and
highly centralized bureaucratic culture in the civil service, which defines
the inherent characteristics of public administration. Inasmuch as Asian
nations are subject to the influence of international reform movements
and paradigms, they have also followed previous paths of administrative
development and modernization started since independence or post-War
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
265
political transition, with distinct reform logics grounded in national
regime needs.
Since the founding of the communist regime in 1949, China has been
embroiled in several decades of government structural reforms and
decentralization and recentralization, as the party-state responded to central government burden and local challenges within the context of ideological conflict and power struggles. Since the 1980s, there have been
gradual and increasingly bold attempts to marketize the economy, reducing the size of both the state and the public ownership sector. The pursuit
of civil service reform, if put within an international perspective, seems
part of an overall attempt to “debureaucratize” state organizations so as
to enhance institutional competence, but it can also be construed as a
process of “rebureaucratization” geared toward transforming an administrative machinery previously dominated by revolutionary cadres into a
bureaucracy more akin to the rational-meritocratic Weberian model. Such
attempts at rationality building, however, are subject to political constraint—the national civil service system introduced in 1993 has continued to reiterate the “party managing cadres” dogma (Chan; Lan). The
primary logic of administrative reforms, despite downsizing the state
bureaucracy, hiving off agencies and enterprises, and streamlining government structures, has remained that of reinforcing the communist
party-regime in a redefined scope.
The same state-enhancing logic applies to several other jurisdictions.
Singapore has gone through four stages of public service reforms since
independence in 1965—from “survival” (1960s) and “efficiency” (1970s)
to “people” (1980s) and “change” (1990s) (Commonwealth Secretariat
1998, 14). All of these reform processes aimed to strengthen and enhance
the efficiency and leadership capacity of the civil service bureaucracy.
They have been accompanied by a policy to get the best into the civil
service in line with the “macho-meritocracy” ethos (Vogel, 1053), with
competitive pay regimes implemented for ministers and senior civil servants. Consistent with this policy path, the PS21 (Public Service 21) initiative of 1995 is ultimately about strengthening government leadership
rather than managerialism per se (Cheung 2003b). The same is true of
Hong Kong, governed by the bureaucracy during the British colonial
period and keen to pursue administrative self-improvements since the
1970s. There, the civil service had long been held in high esteem, enjoying
almost infallibility in efficiency, until the Asian economic crisis, and more
recently, major policy blunders and the fiscal deficit together induced an
about-face toward the civil service (Cheung 2001, 2002c). But civil service
resistance continues to halt the implementation of a more far-reaching
reform agenda, which is perceived to upset stability.
In Japan, despite a long history of administrative reform involving the
establishment of successive administrative reform councils and commissions since the 1960s, the reform experience has pointed to a slow and
somewhat hesitant process, because of the previously successful inter-
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locking array of institutions that were resistant to rapid change (Beeson).
Reform proposals were often a compromise with the agency bureaucrats,
known as “preemptive bureaucrats,” whose attitude was critical to the
success of major structural changes, as in the privatization of Japan
National Railway and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (Ito, 251). The
existence of “bureau pluralism” has ensured the well-entrenched power
of the bureaucracy, while the legalistic tradition of public administration,
requiring lawmaking to endorse administrative and organizational
arrangements, also renders any reform process highly politicized and
time consuming as it entails executive–legislative compromise on top of
politics–bureaucracy bargaining (Nakamura 2002). (Such “legalism” is
also typical of South Korea and Taiwan, both former Japanese colonies.)
As Akira Nakamura commented (1999, 137), Japan seemed ready to
undertake the task of reforming the government, with decentralization,
deregulation, and the reduction of central agencies placed on the agenda,
but skepticism persists because of the “growth of a concerted effort on
the part of national bureaucrats to thwart reform efforts,” in addition to
various entrenched vested interests.
The genesis and evolution of the South Korean bureaucracy points to
a postcolonial bureaucracy inheriting “overdeveloped” administrative
structure instituted by Japanese colonial masters (Woo-Cumings, 435).
Like in Japan, the majority of laws originated with the bureaucracy and
not with legislators, and administrative policies were strictly originated
and orchestrated within the bureaucracy itself (Woo-Cumings, 453). During military rule, administrative reforms were instituted from above in
an effort to legitimize a highly unpopular regime (such as the “small
government” concept actively pursued by then President Chun Doo
Hwan), but many did not last and the bureaucracy soon returned to its
former size. The post-1997 Kim Dae Jung government used reform to
build a “small but strong government” to face the economic crisis. Reform
attempts in the past were mostly conducted under the facade of national
emergency and crisis, hence lacking strong public support (P. S. Kim, 175).
Bureaucrats generally saw reform activities as a source of instability and
uncertainty (Hahm and Kim, 491). Many public officials have shown a
tendency toward pockchi-pudong—“lying down and refusing to budge”—
while some like to harp on the theme of “the good old days” (P. S. Kim,
176). There is greater advocacy for NPM lately, triggered by globalization
and fiscal stress, but the institutional setting for change remains intact.
Administrative change in Malaysia since independence in 1957 has
gone through four phases—maintenance administration until the late
1960s, development administration in the 1970s, cultivation of an efficient
civil service in the 1980s, and the adoption of business practices since the
late 1980s (Halligan and Turner, 66–69). Each was a result of environmental factors (particularly economic conditions and societal demands) and
the developmental policies and objectives of the government. Under
development administration, it was recognized that civil servants should
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
267
become key agents of change, and the public sector was to play a central
role in promoting development and institution building. The Malaydominated bureaucratic elite also constitutes the power base of the United
Malay National Organization, which has ruled the country continuously
since independence through a national front regime.
In the Philippines, public administration had gone through the postindependence days of rapid expansion in civil service employment, corruption, and inefficiencies to Ferdinand Marcos’ reorganization reforms
and his centralization and militarization of state institutions in the 1970s
and early 1980s, and then to Corazon Aquino’s administrative reform to
“demarcoify” the bureaucracy (Halligan and Turner, 100). Fidel Ramos’
Philippines 2000 required a responsive and effective bureaucracy, to facilitate the implementation of development plans. Despite NPM themes of
decentralization, empowerment and client orientation, the main thrust of
Aquino’s bureaucratic reorganization was to purge public organizations
of Marcos appointees and supporters. Neither Aquino’s nor Ramos’
reforms had made any real impact, which Mark Hayllar attributes largely
to political disruptions and resistance, ultimately subjecting whatever
changes initiated to the old paradigm of patronage and pork-barrel
politics.
In most Southeast Asian countries, public sector jobs provided employment for constituents and opportunities of patronage for political supporters, helping to consolidate the power of the ruling elites, for example,
in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Cutting the size of
the public sector often failed to go beyond the rhetoric and would anyway
be opposed strongly, forcing the regime to provide substitute provision,
for example, through state-sponsored or government-linked enterprises.
Overall, some bureaucracies were too strong and too resistant to reform,
while others, like in the Philippines and Indonesia, had a capacity level
too low to undertake vigorous modernization (Nunberg, 19).
India has inherited from the former British colonizers a powerful
administrative service. The civil service is accorded constitutional status.
Legal and constitutional guarantees, intended to protect civil servants
from arbitrary actions and unjust administrative decisions, have also
come to be used as “the ‘guardian’ of corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats” (Jain, 1305). Attempts to formulate and implement development
plans under “command capitalism” were accompanied by a quick proliferation of administrative planning and agencies and the phenomenal
growth of public services for developmental purposes. Despite several
decades of administrative reforms, progress had been uneven. R. B. Jain
(1325, 1327) attributed this to the politico-administrative environment:
“Political interference, influence peddling, growing nexus between politicians, criminals and bureaucracy, pervading corruption in all walks of
public life, muscle-flexing through the unions have made even the most
legitimate means of control and accountability meaningless in the administrative parlance.” The Indian experience has been typical of South Asian
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ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
countries. Mohammand Mohabbat Khan (86) also argued that elite civil
services there had been the vanguard of resistance to any attempt to
change the status quo and had largely been successful because of the
political leadership’s undue dependence on them.
Empowering rather than Denigrating the Bureaucracy
The bureaucracy in most Asian countries is essentially a modernizing and
developmental bureaucracy, in line with the nature of the state. Hence,
most Asian governments have resorted to public management reforms in
order to secure new or reinvented structures and systems of operations
that can improve the capacity of the state (and of the bureaucracy) so as
to better lead nation building and economic development efforts. Many
Asian countries have been governed as one-party regimes (such as China
and Vietnam in which political and bureaucratic interests are one) or
corporatist regimes based on a coalition of party, bureaucratic, business,
and even military interests (as in several Southeast Asian nations, notably
Indonesia and Thailand prior to democratization, and in South Korea and
Taiwan before regime transition). In Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea,
there has also been a long history of bureaucracy-dominated policy making. It is thus inconceivable for any administrative reform undertaken to
adopt an antibureaucratic or bureaucracy-skeptic slant as in some Western countries (as noted in Britain, North America, and Australasia,
although less so in Continental Europe such as in France and Germany).
Instead, the bureaucracy in East and Southeast Asia is often credited
with its expertise and vision in promoting economic development.
Administrative reforms have mostly adopted a pro-bureaucracy or at
least a bureaucracy-friendly orientation, and are usually bureaucratsdriven. They were conceived not within the context of denigrating civil
service competence, but rather enhancing its importance within the paradigm of the East Asian miracle. Both Hong Kong and Singapore, for
example, shared the characteristics of what Hood (1996) described as the
“Japanese way” of NPM reform (i.e., high opportunity, low motive). There
was neither a collapse nor discrediting of the old public administration
regime. The two administrative states have remained powerful and
strong. In the aftermath of the Asian crisis, as global recession continues,
both city-states have encountered economic and fiscal difficulties. In
Singapore, the People’s Action Party civil service governing coalition
still persists, and there is one mind in pursuing public sector reforms for
more overt managerial and economic objectives. In Hong Kong, reforms
were driven by the dominant bureaucracy until most recently when a
split emerged between the new political elites (represented by newly
appointed ministers from outside the civil service) and the bureaucratic
mandarins, resulting in a new reform rhetoric critical of civil service
performance (Cheung 2004). In South Korea, it was reported that “bureaucratic policy making was too strongly advocated to argue against its
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269
prevalent role images. Usually some innovative higher civil servants initiated a leading role in administrative reforms, although government
bureaucracy is basically conservative and resistant to change” (B. W. Kim,
25).
Recent public sector reforms in Malaysia have all the exhortations of
NPM. Reform measures for improving productivity and quality included
(1) the New Remuneration System, which provided a more flexible civil
service pay structure linked to performance appraisal, (2) the Modified
Budgeting System entailing budgetary devolution and accountability, and
(3) Client’s Charters. There are also efforts to combine entrepreneurship
and ethical values in remolding the civil service culture. The civil service
is to become more mission-oriented, dynamic, and resilient, and to adapt
itself to the transformational agenda for national development under the
Vision 2020 plan launched in 1991. Yet, the developmental nature of the
bureaucracy remains intact. As a key government advocate of reform
explained, the Malaysian public service “was seen to be the least parochial
of institutions in society and when all else failed, the public service stood
ready to fulfill its assigned role” (Karim,18).2
The bureaucracy of Thailand, embracing the military, police, and civil
administration, had been the leading power in a country that was ruled
as a bureaucratic polity. For a long time, political organs of government
had been largely under the control of the bureaucracy, with the image of
the bureaucrat far superior to that of the politician (Halligan and Turner,
157). Democratization of political institutions that began in the 1990s has
yet to reach a stage that could fully subdue bureaucratic power. Civil
servants enjoy good protection under the 1992 Civil Service Act from
punitive action by ministers. Since 1991, successive Thai governments
have made public sector reform a high priority. However, despite reforms,
the new Civil Service Act was described as “pro-bureaucrat and antipolitician” (Halligan and Turner, 173), and Bidhya Bowornwathana (2000,
403) observed that the bureaucratic nature of the Thai polity meant
that the bureaucrats controlled the agenda of reform, its pace, and its
execution.
Administrative Reform as Political Solution and Patronage
All administrative and management reforms carry a political purpose. In
the case of Asia, a close intermingling between administration and politics
and between government and business have resulted in administrative
reforms often becoming an arena for the pursuit of political interests. The
privatization of public enterprises is a good case in point (Cheung 2002b).
The public enterprise legacy in most Asian countries has resulted from a
deliberate state policy on nation building and economic development.
Some governments pursued public ownership for ideological reasons (as
in pre-reform China and Vietnam), and others (such as South Korea,
Taiwan, and Malaysia) used public enterprises for political patronage and
270
ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
social redistribution purposes. The existence of a large and extensive
public enterprise sector had created not only a state-dominated economic
structure that would require a long time and a strong political will to
transform, but also an institutional configuration of interlocking economic, social, and political interests hard to disentangle in order to make
way for more fundamental reforms. As such, coalitions of interlocking
interests remain in power, continuing to espouse a state-managed economic strategy; reform policies, such as privatization, were often adopted
not for the purpose of reducing the role and influence of the state, but
rather to strengthen state capacity in alternative ways, underpinned by
the same institutional logic that drove the previous public enterprise
boom.
While most Asian countries have pursued a privatization policy of
some kind since the 1980s, privatizations in individual countries were
more motivated and shaped by domestic factors—very often political and
social, unconnected with efficiency concerns. For example, privatization
in Malaysia turned out to be a policy tool to facilitate handing over
privatized enterprises and assets to selected indigenous bumiputera interests, in much the same logic as that of the previous public enterprise
policy (Jumo, Adam, and Cavendish). In South Asia, recent enthusiasm
for privatization and marketization has been marked by rent seeking of
internal power blocs (Haque 2001b, 1425–1426). In India, for example,
highly profitable public enterprises were sold at heavily discounted prices
to businesses close to the government. Similarly, the major beneficiaries
of market-driven policies in Pakistan and Sri Lanka were business,
bureaucratic, and political elites. Privatization in Taiwan in the 1990s was
more a response to political democratization and the rise of indigenous
Taiwanese business power who demanded a share of the public enterprises long monopolized by supporters and cronies of the previous Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist) regime (Liou). In Singapore, privatization
facilitated the expansion of stock market capitalization and underpinned
the government’s new regionalization policy to encourage governmentlinked corporations to invest overseas as economic entities without undue
government shadow (Low, 104–107).
As regards public sector reform in general, Hong Kong pursued such
reform before 1997 not because of any pressing fiscal or economic needs,
but more in order to secure a management answer to the challenge of
political transition (Cheung 1999). In Taiwan, the abolition of the provincial layer of government in 1998, in the name of downsizing and fiscal
efficiency, was partly, if not predominantly, motivated by the political
objective to remove an important island-wide power base of former provincial governor James Soong, an adversary of previous President Lee
Teng-hui (McBeath). Political liberalization and regime transition during
the 1980s and 1990s triggered a general process of “de-authoritarization”
and depoliticization of the civil service. Current government-reinvention
reforms, although influenced by NPM and U.S. reinvention reform fash-
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
271
ions, have also been motivated by the new Democratic Progressive Party
government’s attempt to revamp a bureaucracy long dominated and
shaped by the KMT (Cheung 2003a).
In China, reform measures, such as government restructuring, civil
service system, decentralization, and fiscal devolution, serve a political
mission. They are not just for the sake of load shedding or catching up
with the global reform trends. Rather, they are ultimately geared toward
preparing the still politically centralized and authoritarian party-state for
coping better with governance challenges in a marketized and increasingly fragmentary environment where localism is on the rise to become
both the impetus for, and constraint on change (Cheung 2002a, 268). In
Thailand, according to a close local observer (Bowornwathana 2002), current Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has been attempting to use
administrative reform as a political instrument to consolidate his control
over the bureaucracy, and thus his own political power.
Paradox of Asian Administrative Reform
A paradox of Asian administrative reforms is that these reforms very
often are promoted by authoritarian and sometimes nondemocratic or
illiberal regimes in a system with a weak or even subordinate private
economy and a premature, although gradually rising, civil society. Hence,
the success of reforms depends on those established political and bureaucratic interests that might otherwise be regarded as targets of reform and
thus likely to be resistant to change. As Cheung and Scott (17–18) argue,
administrative competence cannot be achieved without strengthening the
capacity of the state to govern and mobilize social resources and support.
Similarly, methods and procedures to bring about efficiency, accountability, coherence, and probity cannot fully work if devoid of the wider
contexts of policy capacity and state capacity.
In many parts of Asia there is close intermingling between state and
economy and between state and society when the society (or market) is
still largely dependent on or subservient to the state. If economic and
social ills are considered an outcome of the Asian system of governance,
then rather than expecting an external force (such as international agencies) and externally imposed reform packages to work in bringing about
fundamental changes, one has to look for a domestic “will” to reform.
That will can come about only with the support of appropriate incentive
mechanisms (and reform motives) built into an unsatisfactory system.
Given the mixed impact of reforms on the vested interests of dominant
elites, opposition to, or sabotage of reform is common as in the case of
Taiwan (Dickie) and to some extent Hong Kong these days. Reforms as
designed and implemented by the reform elites may also create room for
malpractice and opportunities for all kinds of rent-seeking activities by
bureaucrats through whom reforms have to be implemented as already
noted above.
272
ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
Authoritarian regimes undergoing reform face the dilemma of how to
retain political control and yet enable the economy and society to liberalize to help secure popular support. China is a case in point. After all, most
such regimes aim to strengthen their capacity rather than weaken it
through reforms. They may not therefore allow going too far in the decentralization of powers and resources as what the “good governance” paradigm or NPM reform rhetoric preaches. Bureaucratic corruption poses
another dilemma. Much corruption in Asia is institutionalized. To the
extent that the civil service system is also built upon institutionalized
patterns of patronage and corruption, coupled with low pay and wide
discretion in levying charges and finding other means of income supplementation (as in Indonesia and China), efficiency and merit in civil service
reform is often more claimed than accomplished.
In India, where the principles of civil service merit and neutrality as
inherited from previous British rule are constitutionally prescribed, public
administration is subject to political intrusion and corruption of another
kind, rendering reforms very difficult if not impossible. As an Indian civil
servant put it, the civil service has been corrupt and has served the narrow
ends of patrimonial politics (Das, 227). The present system has worked
well only in coordinating rents and getting them shared across both the
official and political realms. Accepting new reform paradigms like NPM
would necessarily mean confining politics to the realm of policy making
that offers limited prospects for rent seeking, something not welcomed.
On the other hand, day-to-day administration provides ample opportunity for money making, such as transfers and postings of civil servants,
awarding of major contracts and concessions, and the provision of goods
and services free or below market prices (Das, 228). As such, Indian
politicians do not take kindly to administrative reforms that separate
policy making from policy implementation, or other aspects of good
governance. As in other developing countries, new management
approaches in India and Sri Lanka were often introduced with a good
deal of rhetorical commitment; in all sectors, governments tended to
restructure their organizations rather than to make a real change in what
they do (Batley, 762).
COMPARING ASIAN ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS
Different Conditions for, and Routes of, Reform
Returning to the two questions posed at the beginning of this article, the
above discussion points to a diversity of motives, imperatives, and constraints pertaining to administrative reforms in Asian countries. It is
impossible to pack these reforms into a particular paradigm, not to mention one in contrast with any claimed global reform model. In any case,
the existence of any dominant global paradigm has been much debated
in the literature. Even among OECD countries, generally regarded as
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
273
pursuing similar forms of public management reform, different paths
have been identified (Pollitt and Bouchaert). The purpose of this article
is not to engage in any “Asian versus Western” argument or clash-ofcivilizations theorization. However, understanding the complexities
and diversities of Asian administrative reforms helps to sensitize us to
more particularistic domestic traditions and conditions that are largely
responsible for shaping the actual reform agenda, transcending the
influence of international ideas and good-governance prescriptions.
There are obviously various ways of presenting the Asian administrative reform scene. Categorization can be based on the degree of economic
development, state–business relations, cultural affinities, or common heritage in administrative traditions. It can also be premised on the degree
of enthusiasm for change (the enthusiastic, the cautious, and the ignorant,
as Turner [2002] described it), or the motives and outcomes of reform.
Putting different Asian countries into an “administrative” Asia is neither
feasible nor meaningful. Still, what has been discussed has revealed at
least several significant clusters of Asian reform countries (see Table 2),
based on administrative traditions and legacies, political economy, state
role and capacity, salience of administrative reform, and the forces and
progress of change.
Commonalities and Differences
National administrative systems vary from country to country as a result
of constitutional design, political evolution, and institutional legacies.
Many Asian countries have adopted a state-planned, state-led, or statemanaged approach to economic and social development, whether in a
capitalist or socialist setting. This has meant not only the expansion in
scope and powers of the state vis-à-vis the economy or society, resulting
in lopsided relationships that nowadays demand more fundamental
governance-structure reforms to correct. In the past, it had also led to
the rapid growth of the bureaucracy and proliferation of the quasigovernmental public sector, organized as complex hierarchies engaged
in interlocking structures with businesses and major social groups, not
to mention networks of government patronage and public employment
for social distribution purposes found in some countries like Malaysia
and Indonesia.
Against such a common pro-state or statist institutional background,
it is not surprising to observe that reform programs in Asia have not
carried any overtly anti-public sector perspective, and do not seek to
denigrate the bureaucracy per se. Administrative reforms remain essentially policy instruments to shore up an existing pro-state, and very often
also pro-bureaucracy, regime. This does not mean that Asian publics are
necessarily happy with bureaucratic performance. Quite the contrary,
public dissatisfaction has been one of the key factors inducing and sustaining the reform momentum, at least at the level of political discourse.
Japan and East Asian
“NICs”a
Strong, centralized
bureaucratic tradition;
politics-administration
fusion (Singapore and Hong
Kong are typical
“administrative states”)
Developmental state—
“governed market” model
(with the exception of Hong
Kong, which displays a
semi-interventionist model)
Historically strong capacity;
highly interventionist (less
so in Hong Kong)
Bureaucratic modernization
and self-improvement; state
capacity enhancement
Regional
Subgroupings
Administrative traditions
and legacies
Nature of
political
economy
State role and
capacity
Salience of
administrative reform
TABLE 2
Clusters of Asian Reform Countries
Bureaucratic modernization
and efficiency
improvement; better
subservience to political
control
State capacity largely
dependent on regime
control over economy and
society
Bureaucratic modernization
and rationality building,
within context of regime
consolidation and
institutional reconfiguration
State capacity in question as
economy transits toward
market
From state-planned to statedominated economy and
development
Communist one-party
authoritarian bureaucratic
rule; politics in
administration (state and
bureaucracy are one)
Mostly postcolonial (and
some also post-military)
regimes, with strong
bureaucratic state having
close links to business
“Government-in-business”
model with highly
institutionalized
government–business
relations
Socialist “Transition” States
Southeast Asian Developing
States
Political control and
bureaucratic
modernization
State capacity in question
due to political and
bureaucratic corruption
State regulative controls—
“command capitalism” in
India
Postcolonial regimes, with
relatively strong, centralized
bureaucratic tradition (In
India, the civil service enjoys
constitutionally protected
status)
Subcontinent States
274
ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
Socialist “Transition” States
Party-state driven, to
enhance regime capacity to
cope with legitimacy and
efficiency crises
Party-dominated agenda for
reinvigoration of existing
regime; reform not allowed
to dilute regime control
Southeast Asian Developing
States
Mainly politics driven (to
enhance bureaucratic
efficiency), coupled with
societal demands (In
Taiwan, Thailand, and
Indonesia, regime change
has brought about political
desire to check or subdue
bureaucratic power. There is
also pressure from
international organizations
on Indonesia)
Results slow and mixed;
problematic “public service
bargain” and bureaucratic
skepticism and resistance at
times
Newly industrialized countries (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong).
Bureaucratic domination of
reform agenda, with slow
progress (Successful “public
service bargain” in
Singapore, hence minimum
bureaucratic resistance)
Outcome so
far
a
Mainly bureaucrats driven,
until most recently when
politics and societal
demands pushed for greater
pace of reform (In
Singapore, there is a joint
politics–bureaucracy
agenda)
Japan and East Asian
“NICs”a
Forces for
change
Regional
Subgroupings
Unclear “public service
bargain” or lack of it (as in
India); slow progress and
politicians-bureaucrats
rivalry in agenda setting
Formally politics driven,
although bureaucracy has
inherent interest and say
over substance and pace
of reform
Subcontinent States
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
275
276
ANTHONY B. L. CHEUNG
However, the private sector oriented and neoliberal connotations of current global reform ideas, such as NPM, do not sit logically with the rather
statist and bureaucratic nature of many Asian administrative systems, not
to mention the bureaucracy-driven nature of many reforms. All the recent
talk about government downsizing and making more use of market
means, as emerging in essentially statistic systems like Japan, Korea, and
even Malaysia and Singapore, has yet to bring about the toning down of
the strong-state tradition. One may argue that even in NPM-pioneer countries in the OECD, public management reform is not divorced from
strengthening state capacity, but such capacity, in the context of many
Asian countries, has to do with preexisting socially dominant and sometimes politically authoritarian regimes. The “old” public administration
regime, in this sense, coexists with the “new” public management
approaches and techniques.
While modernization and self-improvement can broadly cover the
more diverse specific agendas of national reform programs, spanning
decentralization, fiscal reform, efficiency drive, and structural streamlining, there are basically two different types of “failures” being addressed
by such reforms3—the failure (as in India and the Philippines) to create
an effective and relatively incorrupt Weberian bureaucracy, and the putative failure of Weberian bureaucracies in more advanced countries such
as Japan and Korea. In the case of China and Vietnam, one may add a
third type of failure, namely the absence of a rational-legal bureaucracy
that has to be developed in this current reform process as it also tries to
bring about some post-Weberian features of flexibilities and market orientation. Using similar reform instruments to address different types of
system failures obviously represents diverse political motives and reform
agendas, and varying degrees of challenge to the ancien régime.
The lack of a clear ideological or paradigm break with the past means
that reforms have been pursued to the extent of largely preserving preexisting interests and institutions. Political challenges to the old regime
may be on the rise, but whether or not there exist sufficient political will
and organized efforts to reform the existing structures, practices, and
culture depends not only on the general opportunities created by a major
crisis such as the Asian economic crisis or regime change and transition,
which triggers motivations for more fundamental changes or sustains a
conviction for reform, but also on those nation-specific conditions shaped
or dictated by institutional and path-dependency factors. Intra-Asia
variance in reform momentum is found to be determined by changing
politics–bureaucracy relations, regime change and transition, and government–society interaction (e.g., whether public pressures can induce more
proactive response from government leaders).
As discussed earlier, the bureaucracy-dominated nature of policy making in many Asian countries and the fact that some reforms are bureaucrat-driven would ensure that such reforms do not turn out to upset the
system as a whole. To say this is not to deny the possibility of the reform
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS IN ASIA
277
process creating new institutional dynamics that would result in outcomes quite unplanned for and unexpected. Whether public management
reforms would simply restore the old regime, or can in the process transform such regime and its internal institutional relationships remains to be
seen. In this respect, countries such as China and Malaysia should serve
as a good testing case.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The very useful comments made by the anonymous reviewers of this
article in manuscript are gratefully acknowledged.
NOTES
1. “Maintain” refers to tightening up of traditional controls, fiscal restraints,
and campaigns against waste and corruption; “modernize” refers to bringing in more flexible ways of public management and some corresponding
adjustments to the political system; “marketize” refers to instituting as
many market-type mechanisms as possible, entailing penetration of the
administrative system by market values and practices; “minimize” refers to
handing over as many tasks as possible to the market sector (Pollitt and
Bouchaert, 176–178).
2. Muhammad Rais Abdul Karim was Director-General of the Malaysian
Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit in the
Prime Minister’s Department.
3. The author would like to thank one of the reviewers of this article for
pointing this out.
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