The Eastern District Board became Eastern Provisional District Board after the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) was established in 1997 with the appointment system being reintroduced by Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.

Compared to the continuing shrinking in size of the Wan Chai District Council, the government in 2015 decided to transfer Tin Hau and Victoria Park constituencies from the Eastern to the Wan Chai District Council.

[1] Many older political organisations, especially the Reform Club of Hong Kong had a long presence in the Eastern District.

[2] The traditional leftists through the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) also had considerable influence in their traditional stronghold of North Point and passed on its influence to the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) formed in 1992 and gradually expanded to the public estate areas in Shau Kei Wan and Chai Wan, while the influence of the pro-democrats, represented by the Democratic Party and the Civic Party today, was mostly limited to certain areas of private apartments such as Tai Koo Shing and Sai Wan Ho.

The pro-democrats achieved the majority of the council for the first time in the 2019 election in a historic landslide victory amid the pro-democracy protests, taking 32 of the 35 seats in the council, with many of the pro-Beijing strongholds in North Point fell into the hand of pro-democracy independents.