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Governor: I certainly wouldn't wish to describe my senior colleagues and officials as brooms or brushes, particularly since I think in Hong Kong's recent political history brushes have some unfortunate connotations but I take the Honourable Member's point that we should be seeking to secure for the civil service the maximum opportunities for future service for as many people as possible who wish to continue to work for Hong Kong.
I think there are a number of things we can do. First of all, we can give our officials the maximum opportunity of learning more and at first hand about the PRC and PRC officials, the officials with whom they'll be working and co-operating hand in hand in the future. That's why we started the Qing Hua course which I proposed in 1992 to Director Lu and so far I think 170 of our officials have taken advantage of those courses and we'll be running more courses at Qing Hua University in the future and I'd like to pay credit to the University and to all those who've been involved in the courses for the extremely imaginative and effective courses which they've been running.
We've also got to make sure that our Civil Service have all the language skills which they'll require to work with Chinese colleagues in the future. We want a Civil Service which is biliterate and trilingual. So we've been putting more resources into, in particular, Putonghua courses, into Chinese writing courses and into Cantonese training for some of our expatriate civil servants. Those points are important.
But we also want to try to ensure that Chinese officials have the maximum knowledge compatible with the integrity of our civil service and with the importance of retaining the morale of our civil service. We want to ensure that Chinese officials have the maximum understanding of the way the Hong Kong Government works and the maximum understanding of the personalities and aptitudes and abilities and curricula vitae of all those who make the Hong Kong Administration work so smoothly and we're happy to help in building bridges in that direction as well between Chinese officials and the Hong Kong Administration.
So, I think it's a two-way process. Introducing our officials more to China and Chinese administrators and doing the reverse as well. I'm sure that without being in any way arrogant, that given Hong Kong's record of good, clean, decent, effective public administration, that process of getting to know one another will be one which is much welcomed by Chinese officials and is a process from which I'm sure they will learn as much as we do.