[1] An Election Committee was set up under the Annex I of the Hong Kong Basic Law with four sectors, each comprising 200 members of the Election Committee:[1] The four sectors are subdivided into 38 subsectors.

Members from 35 of the subsectors were returned by election and three subsectors do not require election: the National People's Congress subsector and the Provisional Legislative Council subsector since the Hong Kong deputies to the National People's Congress and the members of the Provisional Legislative Council are ex-officio members of the Election Committee, and the Religious subsector's EC members were returned by way of nomination.

The candidates for four of the 35 subsectors were returned uncontested.

Since 117 Election Committee members were either ex-officio or nominated by the Religious subsector, and four subsectors returning 95 Election Committee members were uncontested, there were 963 candidates remaining to contesting in 31 subsectors for 588 seats in the EC.

[1] Statistics are generated from the Report on the 1998 Legislative Council Elections.