Report by the Advisory Committee on Hong Kong University and the Higher Educational Institutions in Malaya.
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1. We were convened as an informal Committee to examine and advise upon the arrangements to be made for the resumption of the activities of Hong Kong University and other institutions offering higher educational facilities there and in Malaya on the reoccupation of those territories.
2. We were informed that it was desirable that regard should be had both to the important part the Hong Kong University might play in the furtherance of Anglo-Chinese relations and to the longer range requirements of Hong Kong and Malaya in the field of higher education, and that we were not, therefore, restricted to the consideration of the problems which will arise immediately on the reoccupation of Hong Kong and Malaya, but were free to submit such recommendations as seemed to us to be appropriate.
3. For the purposes of our deliberations and recommendations we interpreted the term 'higher education' broadly to include not only post-secondary but also technical and Vocational education.
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We examined the broad functions that Hong Kong University was designed to fulfil and the extent to which those functions had been fulfilled in the past, up to the time of the Japanese occupation.
5. We conceived Hong Kong University to be an institution designed to provide
(a) a University education of British inspiration for students
from China
(2) technical tation of
technical teaching for the Colony of Hong Kong, and higher education of a general character for students
from Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies and other neighbouring places.
6. We found no evidence that the University had not been successful in its second and third functione, but we could not escape the conclusion that the first had not been fulfilled to any great extent.
7*
This failure and the failure to achieve any effective cooperation with Chinese Universities, except during the period of the Sino-Japanese "incident", were, in our opinion, largely duo to (a) the growth of national sentiment and political selfconsciousness in China since the Revolution, and (b) the differences of spoken languages and the high cost of maintaining students at the Hong Kong University compared with the cost of Universities in China which have limited the number of Chinese students seeking admission to Hong Kong University, especially from the interior of China.
8. We were in a position to consider only the financial aspect of these reasons for failure. In so doing we were mindful of the scholarships that have in the past been available at Hong Kong University for Chinese students Prom China, but we concluded that a much more comprehensive scheme for such scholarships than the Colony of Hong Kong could afford would be necessary to offset the difference between the cost of living at Hong Kong University and at Chinese Universities to such an
1.
extent