Class Next Week

Just a reminder that we do have class next week (17 October) because I have to make up for cancelling the lecture on 21 November (sorry, I erred earlier: the cancelled class is 21 November; we do have class on 28 November). We will focus on the media - media perceptions of Hong Kong and the role of the media in the SAR. We will also have tutorials as usual. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Of course, if you are unable to make it due to prior Reading Week plans, travel, or any other reason, that's fine. But I hope you can attend.

The Chief Executive's Policy Address: "We have to see Hong Kong from the perspective of our country's future"

As you know, Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen delivered his policy address yesterday. You may wish to read the entire speech for yourself.

Pertinent to our discussion of Hong Kong's role in the world is paragraph 126:

"To free ourselves from doubt and confusion, we have to see Hong Kong from the perspective of our country's future. Only in doing so will we be able to cultivate the right niche for ourselves in our own nation. Over the past three decades, we have contributed substantially to our country's economic growth. Hong Kong's businessmen were the earliest investors in the Mainland when our country began to reform and open up. Our professionals followed suit and headed north to embark on new ventures. In the coming decade, Hong Kong will remain a balanced, pluralistic, stable and advanced city. We play by the rules of a free market while stressing corporate social responsibility. We embrace modern values while upholding the core values of the traditional Chinese family. We promote democratic development without compromising social stability or government efficiency. We pursue economic growth, and care about environmental protection and cultural conservation. We cherish the personal freedom of individuals and pluralism, and we have a shared sense of national identity. Ours is a Chinese city, as well as a global city. Hong Kong will continue to serve the country in our unique way. We will also lay an even more solid foundation to maintain our own long-term prosperity, stability and development."

Here, the CE gets at the nub of what we have been looking at so far this semester. As Hong Kong pursues its various roles - as a an international financial and business center, a frontline actor in the global fight against infectious diseases, a regional leader in setting rule of law and governance standards, an advocate for China to the rest of the world, and a bridge between China and the U.S. - the SAR's confidence and success in meeting these various international goals and responsibilities is really predicated on its ability to find "the right niche for ourselves in our own nation." To establish its position in the world, Hong Kong has to carve out an appropriate and meaningful place for itself in China's growth and development. The question is: what is that "right niche"?

If you have any reactions to the CE's policy address, feel free to share them.

A Word About Posting - and the Final Exam

We have had excellent comments posted; thank you for contributing. Please keep it up.

For those still holding back, don't feel that you have to write anything very long. You don't need to have a lengthy, finely crafted exposition, just make your point or points - 100 or 200 words will do. By all means, however, if you have a lot to say, then that's fine too. As I have mentioned, I would like everybody to contribute at least three times during the semester. More frequent contribution will help in your assessment in this part of the course, but quality is certainly more important.

My ulterior motive, I should note, is to get you primed for the final exam (at least those of you who have to take one). The final will likely consist of two or three fairly general questions, requiring replies in the form of a short essay of a few hundred words each, not unlike the comments you are posting on the blog. Posting on the blog is therefore good practice for the exam. I'm hoping that you will combine references to what you have heard in lectures with what you have read to provide focused and well thought out answers.

When posting on the blog or when taking the final, don't be too concerned about the correctness of your English, though you should try to write as clearly as you can and with your best effort at grammar and spelling. What counts more are the arguments - and your critical thinking about what you have heard, what you have read and what you already know.

(Yet Another) Question of the Week: Does Hong Kong Have a Role in Fostering Good Relations Between the U.S. and China?

As a lead-in to Wednesday's class and the discussion with Jack Maisano, I thought I would post one more Question of the Week: Does Hong Kong have a role to play as a bridge between the U.S. and China? More generally, should Hong Kong play the role of advocate for China to the rest of the world to improve the understanding of China and its policies? If so, is this a role that Hong Kong has a responsibility to play?

You might recall that, over the years, many members of the Hong Kong community, including several pro-democracy politicians, worked hard to lobby American legislators and policymakers to support the granting of "most-favored nation" (MFN) trading status (later referred to as permanent "normal trade relations", or NTR) to China and then to agree to China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which finally happened at the end of 2001. Look at this speech entitled "Facts Versus Frictions: A Role for Hong Kong in the Sino-U.S. Economic Relationship", which was delivered by Vincent Cheng, Chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp., at HKU nearly two years ago. Note that he specifically limits his discussion to "the Sino-U.S. economic relationship".

(Another) Question of the Week: What is the Impact of Mother-Tongue Instruction in Hong Kong Schools?

Inspired by some of the comments that have been posted, I thought I would pose another Question of the Week: What is the impact of mother-tongue instruction on Hong Kong's overall competitiveness? Should Hong Kong shift back to favor English in schools?

What do you think?

Take a look at this article on the shortage of places at international schools and this summary of the controversy over the use of Cantonese in schools. You might also look at this overview of the issue in the "Hong Kong Stories" section of the website of the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

American Perspectives on Hong Kong

On Wednesday, as you know, our guest will be Jack Maisano, the President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. In advance of the class, you may want to read this speech that Jack delivered in Los Angeles in 2006. I expect that we will again be discussing the environment, particularly since AmCham recently published its second annual Environment Survey. The study found, not surprisingly, that air pollution has become a factor in recruiting professionals to come to live and work in Hong Kong. Here is a press release summarizing the results of the report.

I have uploaded to the WebCT site a pdf of the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on Hong Kong since the handover, which was published in June. It provides quite a good summary of the key issues of the past ten years and offers a bipartisan U.S. perspective on American relations with Hong Kong. The study is intended for an American audience. You can find here a summary of the report and a link to download it directly.

Hong Kong - the Greenest Asian City?

I just came across this new ranking of green cities and found it interesting and surprising that Hong Kong is the best performing in Asia at 18th, ahead of Tokyo (20th), Singapore (45th!) and Kuala Lumpur (49th). (This is another list that is topped by the Nordic nations - Stockholm is No. 1, while Oslo is second.) Mike Rowse and his colleagues at InvestHK should be happy about this. You might also like to check out the country rankings.

Question of the Week: Does Hong Kong Have a (Cultural) Life?

My normal inclination is to choose a Question of the Week that would lead into the following week's lecture topic. But during the POLI0068 IBGM tutorial yesterday, we had such a lively discussion about what Daniel Fung said about Hong Kong's cultural life that I thought it would be fun to put this topic on the table.

Many of the IBGM students felt Daniel Fung had been unfair when he said that, after showing visitors around, there is "diddly-squat" to do in this town once you have had a nice Chinese meal. Others believed he was somewhat elitist by using the lack of a Borders bookshop (a large American chain of bookstores) here as an indication that Hong Kong's cultural life is limited. Some took exception to the observation that young people typically do little else than hang out, go shopping and play video games. We also discussed whether the government should be involved in promoting international cultural activities and attractions - or should the focus be on local Chinese culture. Daniel Fung challenged the notion that Hong Kong is "Asia's World City", at least in terms of culture. If Hong Kong isn't, then should we aspire to be?

So the questions I would pose are the following: Is there a Hong Kong culture? Are we lacking the cultural life that we should have to be a truly international city? Do we need to be a global cultural hub to be a globally competitive and cosmopolitan city? Are we too absorbed by doing business and making money? And should the government be doing more to promote culture - ditch "positive non-interventionism" and adopt an ambitious and aggressive culture policy?

Let's hear your views.

To spur your thinking, you might like to read this article by writer and former Taipei culture chief Lung Ying-tai, who is currently a visiting professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at HKU. This is an unofficial English translation from the original Chinese.

You may also still comment on earlier Questions of the Week - on whether being an SAR of the PRC affects Hong Kong's ability to develop its international relations, and on Hong Kong's competitiveness. Speaking of competitiveness, you might be interested in this comment by one of your colleagues who compared what Mike Rowse told us last week with what we heard from Daniel Fung. Agree - or disagree? Why not reply to this or any other comments? A free-for-all exchange - that's what this blog should be.

Feel free to comment on anything on this blog. And if you wish to initiate a topic, just email me your comment and I can post it.

Summary: Daniel Fung on the Rule of Law and Hong Kong's Competitiveness

• The rule of law is important but it is only one aspect of Hong Kong’s competitiveness

• The basis of the legal systems of Hong Kong and the mainland differ: common law (British) vs civil law (top-down approach, continental)

• Where Hong Kong has failed is in education, culture and the environment
Education:
Cantonese as the language of instruction will diminish Hong Kong's cosmopolitan outlook
There is resistance to academic programs that emphasize critical thinking over rote learning
Too much emphasis on producing lawyers and investment bankers

Culture:
Lack of variety of options and opportunities
Where are the big bookshops and good movies?
Young people just want to hang out and play video games

Environment:
Hong Kong investment in factories in southern China is responsible for a great deal of the problem
We cannot wait for others to resolve the problem

• The moon cake problem: What happens when the mainland is able to make moon cakes of the same quality as HK's
• HK-Shenzhen - Lifting of the border may happen soon. But we still drive on different sides of the road? ie how can there be a merger if the bases of our legal systems differ so fundamentally?
  

The CE's Policy Address

The Chief Executive of the HKSARG will deliver his policy address for 2007-8 on 10 October. Watch for him to talk about many of the issues we have been discussing. Christine Loh and her colleagues at the think tank Civic Exchange have produced their "alternative policy address", which you might find interesting.

More Uploaded Readings

I uploaded to the WebCT site the reports on Hong Kong by the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council. I also put on reserve in the PPA Department office Yash Ghai's article on Hong Kong's autonomy that appeared in the June 2007 issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration. When a reading is available online, I have provided a link to it. For any readings that are not available on WebCT or on reserve, please look for them through the MyLibrary service of the HKU Portal or go to the Library.

For next week, in addition to the readings on the syllabus, you might want to look at this recent speech by U.S. Consul General James Cunningham at a luncheon organized by the Better Hong Kong Foundation. He gives an American perspective on Hong Kong ten years after the handover.

Update on Readings

I uploaded to WebCT more of the digital files of readings that were retrieved from the WebCT site of the previous course.

Please note that for the book by Prof. Yash Ghai, the citation on the syllabus was incorrect. The title is Hong Kong's New Constitutional Order. I'm sorry for any confusion caused. This book IS available online through the MyLibrary resources of the HKU Portal. Access the EBooks electronic resources database and search by title. For other readings, please check the Library. I will try to put more readings on reserve at the Department. If you encounter any other citation errors, please let me know.

BTW, you might be interested in some books recently published by Civic Exchange, the policy think tank. They deal with constitutional development, political leadership, and the environment, and should be useful.

U.S.-Hong Kong Relations: A Business Perspective

Looking forward, our guest speaker on 10 October will be my former colleague Jack Maisano, who is now the President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. Jack will talk about Hong Kong's relations with the U.S. and how investors, particularly American companies, view Hong Kong today. Jack's background is in publishing so he might also have something to say about the role of the media. After hearing from Mike Rowse, it should be interesting to listen to a representative of the investor community - the people InvestHK is courting - offer his views on Hong Kong's competitiveness and business outlook.

The ICAC - Fighting Corruption

Believe it or not, in the 1960s and '70s, corruption was a big problem in Hong Kong. But the territory under the British did something about it. In 1974, the government set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption, which still exists today and is one of Hong Kong's main bulwarks against graft and corruption in the public and private sectors. On Wednesday, Daniel Fung will certainly be talking about the ICAC so I suggest you check out its website and the quick online presentation that outlines how the organization got started. The ICAC has become a model for other anti-corruption agencies in Asia and around the world because of its success at home.

You might be interested in Transparency International's latest Corruption Perception Index, which was released on Wednesday. Hong Kong ranks 14th, one position better than last year. Top of the ranking both this year and last, ie the countries perceived to be the least corrupt: Finland, Iceland and New Zealand.

Lurking on the "Blogospheric" Sidelines?

Nehru said: "The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all." Step forward and share your thoughts on anything on this blog, including the Questions of the Week - on Hong Kong's competitiveness and the impact of its constitution.

Want to see examples of very active blogs? Check out Rebecca MacKinnon's blog (she's the former CNN Beijing bureau chief who is now an assistant professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre here at the University of Hong Kong), blogs available through GlobalVoices (a good source for what bloggers are saying right now about what's going on in Myanmar), and blogs linked to huffingtonpost.com (one of the more popular political blog aggregators in the U.S.). Perhaps you will be inspired to come out from the shadows and contribute!

Further on the Question of the Week

I amended my original posting of the Question of the Week to add a link to this article by Prof. James Tang, which is a summary of a talk he gave in 2000 to the Hong Kong Democratic Foundation. Read this for a discussion of many of the central issues relating to the question I posed.

The Basics

While Mike Rowse was talking last week about Deng Xiaoping and his legendary indifference to the color of mice, I realized that I may have assumed that you are all well acquainted with Hong Kong's history and such terms as "The Basic Law" and "one country, two systems." But maybe not? For those who want to know the issues and what it was like around the time of the handover in 1997 when Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty, you might want to read some of the news stories from around that time and some of the articles written during the 10th anniversary in July. They should give you the basic background. I included the following readings for later in the semester, but you might find it useful to read these sooner:

• “Hong Kong: The Long March”, in Time Magazine, Asia edition, Vol. 169, No. 23, 18 June 2007, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/asia/0,9263,501070618,00.html

• “The Death and Life of Hong Kong: Eating Crow” in globophobe.blogspot.com, http://globophobe.blogspot.com/2007/07/death-and-life-of-hong-kong-eating-crow.html (follow links to the two Fortune Magazine articles – “The Death of Hong Kong” by Louis Kraar and “Oops! Hong Kong is Hardly Dead” by Sheridan Prasso)

• Asiaweek Magazine, Hong Kong Handover special issues, 20 June and 11 July 1997. Follow links at http://globophobe.blogspot.com/2007/07/handover-hangover-what-were-we-doing.html

Here is an Asiaweek cover story that appeared nearly two years after the handover. It deals with Hong Kong's struggle to reinvent itself after getting hit by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.

For those who want to read about how the Hong Kong government works and recent political reforms, you should read this paper which was produced by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in the U.S. and Civic Exchange, a think tank in Hong Kong.

If you would like to watch clips of the handover ceremonies ten years ago, you can view these on YouTube. First, the British farewell and then the handover ceremony itself.

The Rule of Law - and the Question of the Week: How Does Being an SAR of the PRC Affect Hong Kong's Ability to Conduct its International Relations?

By the time of our next class, I will have been to the mainland twice since our last meeting. I was in Beijing last week to give a lecture to about 60 executives and government officials from Africa on a mid-career program at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. They were at the beginning of a study tour of China. Tomorrow, I will be in Shanghai to give a similar talk to a group of MBA students from the same university. I find it fascinating to meet people who are seeing China and what it has achieved for the first time. They are usually amazed by what they experience, particularly if they visit the big cities such as Beijing or Shanghai.

I also find it curious that, for many of these first-time visitors, Hong Kong is of limited interest. They want to know about China. To be sure, whenever I travel to the mainland, I am well reminded that Hong Kong is but a sideshow to the really big spectacular. But sitting here in this bustling city (and certainly after listening to a rousing presentation by that investment evangelist Mike Rowse), it is easy to think of Hong Kong as the main attraction.

Hong Kong of course is still one of the best places in the world in which to do business and it remains China's premier international financial center. Take a look at the "Doing Business 2008" report recently released by the World Bank. The study includes a ranking of economies according to how easy it is to do business. Singapore comes in at No. 1, followed by New Zealand and the United States. Hong Kong is fourth, while China is No. 83. What I find interesting is that if you look at the different sub-categories, Hong Kong ranks first when it comes to "enforcing contracts". This suggests something that I have long believed - that the key to Hong Kong's success really is the rule of law. I would argue that there is no other economy in East Asia with as reliable, efficient and honest a legal system as Hong Kong.

Now what does the rule of law have to do with Hong Kong's international relations? A lot. Because investors have a great deal of confidence in our legal system, they are willing to put their money here, to sign contracts here, to settle disputes in our courts, and to live here. We have kept to a minimum the inefficiency and wastage that can result from corruption and poor public governance. The rule of law has allowed Hong Kong to build up the legal infrastructure necessary to support its role as an international financial center and hub for business.

Daniel Fung will be able to tell us more about the uniqueness of Hong Kong's legal system, which I think goes to the heart of the concept of "one country, two systems". It's not just about communism and capitalism co-existing; it's also about two very different legal systems co-existing in the same sovereign entity. It is also about two different, separated societies that nonetheless are part of the same culture and share traditions, language and common history.

This brings me to the Question of the Week: How does Hong Kong's being a special administrative region (SAR) of China affect its ability to conduct its international relations? I guess what I would like you to think about is how Hong Kong's constitution affects its position in the world and its ability to interact with the rest of the world.

Now, I'm not just talking about the simple fact that Hong Kong is not an independent nation and so we cannot be a member of the United Nations. That much is obvious. But as an SAR of China, Hong Kong has to be conscious of its relationship with the mainland - even as it fosters ties abroad. Are we hampered from being fully engaged with the world because we are part of China and not an independent country? Or is it in fact an advantage, particularly since Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy under Chinese sovereignty and China is a booming economy that is attracting investors from all over the world? What are the implications of closer integration with the mainland, particularly if the divisions between our two systems start to blur? Could the advantages we enjoy because of our separateness - the rule of law, for example - be compromised?

Those are quite a lot of questions. What I would like us to explore are the implications of Hong Kong's constitutional position - both the positive and the negative - for its relations with the rest of the world. Over the coming weeks, we will examine specific issues that will help us understand better the contours of Hong Kong's autonomy and the ways in which the SAR is connected to the international community: the rule of law, the business environment and economy, diplomatic relationships, the media, the political system, the financial system, and the role of corporations and civil society. Our discussions should help us better understand how our domestic situation affects our international relationships.

Any thoughts and comments are welcome. Take a look at this article by Prof. James Tang, which is a summary of remarks he made to the Hong Kong Democratic Foundation in 2000. It might stimulate some ideas for you to consider.

In framing your comments, you might consider the issues Prof. Tang raises, some of what we have already heard from Malik Peiris and Mike Rowse, as well as what you have read. But also bring your own ideas to the table. Don't hold back.

Still Questioning...

The "Question of the Week" on Hong Kong's competitiveness is still open for comment. If you haven't read them yet, check out the four great comments from your colleagues. I'll hold off posting a second question until next week since there are no classes until 3 October.

Daniel Fung on the Rule of Law

On Tuesday, I didn't have time to tee up the next lecture which isn't until 3 October. Our guest will be Daniel Fung, SC, senior barrister and former solicitor-general of Hong Kong. Check out his bio here. He will be discussing the rule of law in Hong Kong, which Mr Rowse mentioned as one of Hong Kong's core competitive advantages. For those who haven't yet read the Basic Law, in advance of the class, you might want to check out the sections relating to the Judiciary.