AbstractUsing the Hong Kong police as an empirical case, this paper explains how a public bureaucracy attempts to respond to the pressures of modernization through two types of expansion, one direct, the other indirect. In this case, functionally indirect expansion is represented by an overconcentration of control through excessive hierarchic layers and by an incommensurate relationship between ranks and functions. Function‐oriented expansion‐ aside from regular bureaucratic expansion in size that corresponds to increased functions and tasks resulting from population growth and modernization‐also takes the forms of inspection, professionalization, and externalization. Functionally indirect expansion may be potentially beneficial but also wasteful. To the extent that social prosperity, which renders bureaucratic waste affordable and tolerable, may not last forever, the rationalization of functionally indirect expansion and the promotion of function‐oriented expansion are i