Leo Goodstadt, Regina Connolly and Frank Bannister
when the government was actually reducing the supply and the standards of public services and increasing their cost for the first time since the 1950s( Goodstadt 2009a).
As in the cases of Germany, there is an element of public choice about the Hong Kong personal identity card and the functions that it provides. Initially, there was a proposal that cards could incorporate a driving licence, municipal library card and a digital certificate which would facilitate the surge in electronic transactions that officials believed would be generated as a result of their ambitions for expansion of the Hong Kong digital economy. In practice, as has been the experience in Europe, the citizens of Hong Kong have shown little enthusiasm for taking advantage of these voluntary features of the new card. The most revealing public choice in this context was the failure of the identity card to become an‘ electronic purse’.
A number of additional factors also help to explain the success of the Hong Kong EIC. The attractions of the identity card have been described in terms of building a sense of community. This phenomenon developed in the 1970s and strengthened sharply with the 1980 legislation that criminalized failure to carry an identity card at all times and which was accompanied by an extensive campaign to demonize mainland immigrants as a threat to the community’ s living standards( Ku 2004a; 2004b). However the card’ s principal selling point with the Hong Kong public lies in its contribution to solving the practical problems of a refugee city whose political and legal status was ill‐defined as far as immigrants with no English and less knowledge of Western‐style law and administration were concerned in the first decade after World War II.
The success of the Hong Kong EIC is thus grounded in several historical and cultural factors. One is identity itself; it enables the Hong Kong Chinese to be differentiated from the mainland Chinese when it comes to services, entitlements and standard of living. But what may be even more important is how the concept of identity is situated in Hong Kong’ s history where use of identity has been necessary to try to control the enormous influx of visitors, both tourists and would be immigrants into the colony.
4. Reflections
There are several interesting points and possibilities for further research that emerge from this brief examination.
• The first is that since countries divide into those that have a history of requiring citizens to carry ID and those that do not and that this can be a long standing position or more recent, any study into the take‐up of EICs needs to start from this historical context. In countries which historically have not had this requirement there continues to be considerable resistance to its introduction. There is little indication of any country that has tried to use technology as a means of accelerating acceptance having much success so far.
• Second, there is a clear distinction been cards that carry what it sometimes called token identification, i. e. which provide proof of identity, and what might be called‘ public service’ cards which, like a form of credit card, entitle the holder to receive selected public services. Whilst outside the scope of this paper, an interesting point is the evolution or co‐evolution of these types and which path might lead to greater success.
• Third, even where there is a requirement to carry identification, only some countries have made the carrying of an electronic version of identity mandatory. Some countries, notably Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK( De Maio 2012), are pursuing a‘ digital by default strategy’, which may in time oblige citizens to use an e‐card of some nature when dealing with the state. The progress of such semicoercive attempts at introduction will provide an interesting research area.
• Fourth, the impact of‘ voluntariness’ in the use of feature of an EIC card needs further study. In Germany and Hong Kong, citizens can elect to use these‘ voluntary’ features( in other countries there is no such choice). The evidence to date suggests that citizens are quite selective when given such a choice. Research is needed into why this is so.
• Fifth, as has been the case in Austria, the identity card can be virtual in the sense that it can be embedded in other technologies. This has parallels with the way that many governments now accept the use of digital signatures when citizens are dealing with the state, though such signatures may be service specific( for example for tax filing). The idea of a virtual EIC opens up many possibilities and may be one way to
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