1
SHAPING UP FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
4
FOR a place that is so consumed with the present it is astonishing to see so much about the future in the media. When we pause to think, we do think about the future in the sense of our political future. Some will think about the long-term infrastructure plans. After a pause for speculation most of us will drop the subject, usually because some more pressing problem is thrust on us - a matter that has to be dealt with - immediately - by fax.
Few of our day-to-day decisions depend on how we see things 10 years or more hence. This applies as much to government activity as to private business and personal affairs yet the change of sovereignty to take place in 1997 does mean that in Hong Kong we do think and talk more about how we see things in the future.
The future is based on the present and rooted in the past. Change is ceaseless but not random. If I describe Hong Kong as a place with a small urban community, mostly on the Island, round part of the harbour, a large rural hinterland where some of the best rice in China is grown, a population of two million, a place where bare feet are common in Central, where only the smartest offices and none of the homes have air-conditioning, where there are practically no teenagers or old people, where primary schooling is a privilege, where tuberculosis is the biggest killer and lepers have to be isolated, where a large part of the population lives in flimsy wooden shacks that burn down leaving thousands homeless, where night-soil ladies clear most of the lavatories, I might be accused of fantasising on the dim distant past. In fact this was Hong Kong as I found it when I came to work here at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century.
In less than fifty years the city has been rebuilt, has spread right round the harbour and into new towns, the rice fields that are not new towns have become a rural squalor of workshops, houses, market gardens, car and container dumps, or they have been abandoned, the population is five and a half million, rapidly ageing and with a dwindling proportion of children, bare feet are only found on the beach, half the housing estate homes have an air-conditioner, the education debate is over curriculum as we aim to make a degree course available for six out of 10 students completing sixth form, leprosy gone and tuberculosis rapidly going, life expectancy at birth is higher than in Britain or America, the last of the urban squatters, now in solid but not elegant structures, will soon be gone – and everyone can flush the loo.
-
In the light of this perspective it takes some really perverse determination to be gloomy about the future.