Compared with traditional active power filter (APF), the hybrid active power filter (HAPF) can be considered as a good tradeoff between compensation range and active inverter rating. However, the load harmonic and reactive power is easily beyond the compensation range of HAPF, the HAPF with the conventional control methods cannot provide satisfactory compensation performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a selective power management control to keep the satisfactory harmonic power compensation performance and partial reactive power compensation for above situation. In this paper, the capacity of the HAPF in terms of reactive power, harmonic power and dc-link voltage is deduced firstly. Then, a selective control method is proposed to selectively manage reactive and harmonic power based on pre-designed HAPF capacity. After that, the reference compensating current can be obtained through pulse width modulation (PWM) to control the HAPF. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed selective power management control for the HAPF.