CHAPTER 1
Hong Kong Gears Up
for a World Without Walls
The Chief Secretary for Administration, Mrs Anson Chan, GBM, JP, examines how the challenges of 1999 have laid the foundations for continued economic, political and legal development in the new century.
HONG KONG has always been an unlikely place. Born of the China trade in the most dubious circumstances, it was scorned by its colonisers as a 'barren rock' that 'would never become a mart of trade'. This 19th century forecast only goes to show that the perils of political prediction have a long pedigree. But it had its uses, for in a way it may have steeled the inhabitants of Hong Kong to a way of life that was always going to pit them against the odds.
It is certainly true that Hong Kong has no natural resources to speak of, save its fabled harbour where huge container ships and other merchantmen from all corners of the globe have found safe haven and an abundant mart of trade between East and West.
It used to be said that Hong Kong people lived to trade. The facts of history and geography dictated the opposite the people of Hong Kong have had to trade to live. If people are the greatest of all natural assets, then Hong Kong provides the case in point.
In my lifetime, Hong Kong has had to absorb, house and find jobs for wave upon wave of hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of refugees and immigrants from China, my own family among them. It had to transform itself overnight into a light manufacturing centre in the wake of the embargo on trade with China during the Korean War. Then withstand the shock of the disturbances that rocked Hong Kong to its foundations in the upheavals of the mid-sixties. Two decades ago, it metamorphosed itself overnight into a service economy to embrace Deng Xiaoping's opening up of the Chinese economy. And, more recently, it trod the often tricky path. of transition from 156 years of British administration to the resumption of Chinese sovereignty.
Quite a journey. In the space of but two generations, Hong Kong has risen from the ashes of the wartime Japanese occupation to become one of the world's great cities, indeed a great world city.
As dawn broke on the new millennium, Hong Kong has once again become entrenched in the process of reinventing itself, this time to meet and master the challenges of the Information Age. It is a paradigm shift whose impact on the 21st century and on the way people work, do business, enjoy themselves and go about their daily lives will be as profound as the Industrial Revolution which shaped the 20th century. The name of Bill Gates is bound to become to the new century what Henry Ford's was to the last.
With the economy returning to health after the battering of the Asian financial crisis, Hong Kong has thrown itself into the New Economy with typical passion. The
1