ABSTRACT
Citizenship can be regarded as a means of political rhetoric that helps in the search for a better social life for members of society within a given territory. At the time Marshall (1950) suggested a framework for the advocacy of this notion, the British style of Keynes-Beveridge welfare state was established and deemed to be a system having the potential to ensure each member a minimum level of well-being through the provision of social rights. While Marshall treated the notion as an analytical concept for the study of British social policy, the three components of the concept of citizenship, as suggested by Marshall-namely civil rights, political rights and social rights-had been employed by British politicians as the political yardstick by which the British government was appraised. While Hong Kong had been a Crown colony of Britain and citizenship as a kind of political rhetoric had seldom been put forward as the governing principle of the colonial government, in the 1990s scholars began to throw light on the degree of freedom Hong Kong people could enjoy after the city reverted to Chinese sovereignty. Basically, like the students of citizenship inspired by Marshall, scholars have employed citizenship as a yardstick to measure the extent to which citizenship has been realized (Baehr 2001; Leung 2001; Degolyer 2001; Scott 2001; Lo 2001). This chapter, however, focuses more on citizenship as a form of governance, showing the particular nature of the state-society relationship in Hong Kong.
