4
REVIEW
what Britain can command, even today command. Japan is no bigger than California and without California's natural resources. But even Japan today has more natural resources than Hong Kong as Japan moves, despite that deficiency, toward a gross national product that by 1990 may exceed that of the United States.
Hence, Hong Kong's success cannot be explained in the same terms as Britain's industrial revolution and its network of reciprocal colonial trade. Nor can it be explained in terms of the post-Confucian theory often advanced to account for the success of natural resource-poor Japan. Hong Kong workers do not begin their factory-day with morning exercises, nor do they end their day at the British pub. Few Hong Kong workers are obliged to don uniforms and fewer are required to sit through pep-talks extolling the national virtue of, for example, making sneakers.
Britain, in its heyday, and Japan and Hong Kong today, are manifestations of different character traits. Japanese early training accepts a more disciplinarian approach. Aims and position can thus be prescribed. The precepts of the business hierarchy and life-time employment in one firm are accepted in Japan and provide security, but are rejected in Hong Kong where personal achievement prevails.
The Hong Kong worker draws his dynamism from firmly believing the sky's the limit for him. Self-reliance seems almost inborn. Parents certainly seem to develop it in their children from early childhood. From teenagers most are bent upon doing their own thing. In Hong Kong there is, as a result, far too much mobility of labour. Employers often complain about the high cost of training labour. Workers learn with remarkable ease and employ greater dexterity than their European counter-parts. But having learned they may leave their employers at almost the drop of a hat for something else that interests them. They protest against, say the air-conditioning system, with their feet. They believe a change is as good as a holiday.
Competing for Markets
The Hong Kong character and traditions preclude an economy planned from the top, such as Japan. Or, the sort of detailed direction that goes into the neighbouring newly industrialising countries, such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, competing for world markets, like Hong Kong does, against the economic giants that enjoy the luxury of large domestic markets - Japan, United States and Europe. The challenge of this decade to all the Asian newly industrialising countries, including Hong Kong, is to upgrade industry with technology transfers from the giants and then to build upon that base with their own indigenous technology. In meeting that challenge Hong Kong so far seems to have done as well, or better than, its newly industrialising neighbours without direction and subsidy from the top. At least, what it has got, free of subsidised capital, is viable.
Sir Philip Haddon-Cave describes the Hong Kong Government's policy as positive non-interventionism. He means limiting regulation and budget spending to socially acceptable parameters and following guidelines that demand only for the public sector the minimum employment of Hong Kong's total resources so that the major share is left to stimulate the private sector to create wealth as it chooses. Only reluctantly has Sir Philip even allowed, for instance, the revenue to be hypothecated for such small levies as are needed for trade and tourist promotion. But he has recently chaired a study on how Hong Kong could increase the diversification of its industries, which produced not directions but recommendations. One result has been the subvention of centralised industrial training to lighten the burdens of the mobility of labour. And the government, in a wider departure, is about to subvent a research and design centre for the electronics industry.