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of Guangdong has grown at a rate of some 13% in real terms. In that same period Hong Kong's total trade with China has more than doubled. The rest of the world is now, at last, waking up to what is happening in Southern China and the role Hong Kong plays in it. Investment and commercial interest here is strong as a result.
22.
Political development in China is likely to be a bumpy process. There will be periods of uncertainty, and maybe some confusion when the present leaders die. But the economic progress of the coastal provinces, and increasingly China as a whole, now has a momentum which would be very hard to stop. This is Hong Kong's hope for the future. This is why it is so important that we should continue to plan and build Hong Kong's infrastructure for the longer term future so that it can go on playing its role as the financial, commercial and service centre of Southern China. It is frustrating that, as I leave, the project for a new airport, without which Hong Kong would gradually lose ground to competitors in the region, is again being put at risk by arguments with China which owe more to political concerns about British policy than the economic issues which are meant to be under discussion.
23. Britain can be proud of its role in Hong Kong. The so-called Opium War may not have been the most propitious way to start; but in 150 years of British administration the "barren rock", which Lord Palmerston criticised Captain Elliott for taking over when he should have signed a commercial treaty, has flourished. Sun Yat-sen, when speaking at Hong Kong University where he had studied before the Chinese Revolution, once said (drawing presumably on Gulliver's Travels): "The person who can make two blades of grass grow where one grew before is a worthy citizen". Under this definition, the British in Hong Kong have been worthy citizens. The British umbrella, and generations of dedicated expatriate public servants, have provided a framework in which the Chinese people of Hong Kong have survived and flourished.
24. It is to the credit of British administration over the years that Hong Kong has been allowed to develop its own economic and trade policies without the heavy handed attempts, notable in the colonial regimes of most other countries, to subordinate local economic interests to those of the metropolitan country. Hong Kong has flourished as a result. In flourishing it has provided many