The authors express their gratitude to Mr. Edmund Chan of the City University of Hong Kong Press for supporting this book project. We also thank the reviewer for giving us extensive comments and suggestions. We are also indebted to Chris Chan of the Press for guiding us to complete this book project in the final stage.

The origin of this book could be traced back to not only the work of one of the authors, Sonny Lo, whose doctoral thesis in 1993 on Hong Kong’s democratization had a chapter on the evolution of District Boards, but also the experience of another author, Steven Hung, who was a member of the Kwun Tong District Board from 1988 to 1999. Sonny interviewed Steven twice formally in 1989 and 1999 for two separate research projects on District Board elections. After the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to mainland China, they have been following district elections, administration, and politics closely. In 2013, when they coincidentally became colleagues in the Department of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, both decided to write a book on district administration, elections, and politics for the sake of describing and analyzing their complexities and transformations. However, they were fully preoccupied with their teaching and administration and did not find the necessary time to write up a solid manuscript on District Councils.

In 2019, the two authors were joined by Jeff Loo and Cody Yau, two young scholars who were interested in the study of political parties in District Council elections. We all decided to write a book on the historical evolution of district administration, party politics, and elections. The reason why we were determined to write this book was that there was a lack of an in-depth and updated study of how politics heavily shaped district administration and elections in Hong Kong. We sincerely hope that this book can and will contribute to our objective and deeper understanding of the very complex politics of district administration and elections in Hong Kong from the British colonial era to the post-1997 period.

The main argument of this book is that district elections and district administration in Hong Kong are closely intertwined from the British colonial era to the post-1997 period. The intertwining relations between electoral politics and district administration run through all the chapters, although some chapters focus more on electoral politics than on district administration.

The division of labor among the four authors was as follows: Sonny was responsible for writing and polishing all the chapters; Steven wrote some draft chapters and dealt with all the statistical data and tables; Jeff handled some tables, bibliography, index, and data collection; and Cody was responsible for the quantitative data collection and analyses in Chapter Six. A lot of preparatory work was done for this book, including an in-depth literature review, comprehensive data collection, data analyses, and the writing process. The project formally began in the summer of 2020 and the first draft was eventually completed in September 2021. The final and revised manuscript was completed in March 2022, incorporating the suggestions from the reviewer and updating our work, especially the addition of Chapter Eight to capture the transformations of District Councils after the promulgation of the national security law in late June 2020.

Finally, we dedicate this book to all the people interested in district elections, politics, and administration in Hong Kong.

Sonny Shiu-Hing Lo
Steven Chung-Fun Hung
Jeff Hai-Chi Loo
Cody Wai-Kwok Yau

December 13, 2022