1
David Love Esq OT2/2
DTI
BRITISH TRADE COMMISSION
HONG KONG.
11 December 1990
Dear Dand
THE FUTURE OF BRITISH BUsiness in HONG KONG
1. In my telno 382 of 28 November I referred to a recently published private study, "The Future of British Business in Hong Kong" by Terence Kwai, of the Strategic Research Institute. You, and Alan Paul to whom I am copying this letter, may be interested to have copies of the study.
2. I have met with Terence Kwai. He is a loquacious young man with a strong academic background. As described in page 92 of the report, he has studied at the California Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He now works as a Management Consultant. The Strategic Research Institute appears to be a body of his own making with not much more to it than himself and an assistant who helped him with this study. He hopes that the study might lead to consultancy and advisory contracts with major companies, particularly those with a British content, to help them avoid the pitfalls which his study predicts. Indeed he has asked me to help him make contact with senior people at Swires, China Light and Power etc. I have agreed to help, but will do so somewhat AMP cautiously.
đ
3. Of interest to us in his study are his classification of British companies and their part in the running of Hong Kong. He has of course used his own somewhat arbitrary definition of what constitutes a British company (as do we all). It is also interesting that he uses the concept of "companies owned, controlled or managed by British nationals". This is more or less the same wording as that used by Henry Keswick and Adrian Swires in their various efforts over the past 2 years to illustrate that the British commercial stake in Hong Kong is much greater than that usually quoted in our official figures. Even within this definition, which is deliberately vague, there are anomalies in the study's determination of British companies. It is not immediately obvious for example why China Light is in and Hong Kong and China Gas is out. But we know well from our own involvement with the passport issue that wherever these lines are drawn involves some subjective decisions. In our discussion I also told Terence Kwai that I thought some of his analogies between what had happened to
/British.