Some academics, such as Joseph Cheng Yu Shek, a politics professor of the City University of Hong Kong, said the civil service in Hong Kong has lacked reform for several decades.

"In the early 1970s, Hong Kong's civil service system was similar to those in the United Kingdom and Singapore. However, in the past 30 years, the systems in these countries have been dramatically reformed, while Hong Kong's has remained stagnant."

In its front-page editorial, the Hong Kong Economic Journal has also lent support Monday to the HKSAR government's plan of legislating.

It said by drafting law, the HKSAR government is only hoping to obtain the same power the private sector has in controlling the employees' pay and thus in narrowing the discrepancies in the economic status between the private and public sectors by cutting the civil servants' salaries by 1.58 percent to 4.42 percent.

It stressed that the measure will not take away any other benefits from the civil servants, adding that so far, no one has come up with a better way than legislating.

"From the current row, we believe there should be a review on the ways in which government contracts are signed in future.... How come the civil servants have had the salary hikes closely indexed with those in the private sector, and not have had their cuts indexed?" the editorial questioned the protesters who took to the street Sunday.

The view of the editorial was echoed by a passerby on the street, who reportedly expressed anger over civil servants in protest of the government's legislating on a small pay cut, saying that such behavior was not acceptable.

"Every one is getting pay cuts, why not the civil servants?" the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Monday.

The SCMP also ran an editorial entitled "The greater good" Monday, commenting that the thousands of civil servants taking to the street "have failed to endear themselves to the most members of the public."

"The fact is that the pay-cut levels, at between 1.58 percent and 4.42 percent, are modest and have been determined through a well-accepted mechanism," the editorial said.

"Even after their salaries are slashed, civil servants will still be overpaid compared with their private sector counterparts, " it said.

The editorial said a law has to be passed to implement the reduction only because the clauses governing pay adjustment in their appointment contracts are murky."

Yet, for the greater good of Hong Kong, "the pay cut must be implemented and civil service reform has to continue," the SCMP said.

With widespread support for the HKSAR government continuous civil service reform, Lau Siu Kai, the head of the Central Policy Unit of the HKSAR government reassured the public that the government will not decrease the pace of the reform due to "the heavy price" the government is paying.

(Xinhua News Agency July 9, 2002)