FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW
January 30, 1969
confidence in the industrial potential of Hongkong. The old Hongkong trade mark of cheap, labour-intensive production is giving way to a growing' emphasis on quality. Regional competitors like South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines are feeding the cheap labour markets, and Hong- kong industrialists are following their Japanese competitors into more complex and capital-intensive methods. The indus- trial development drive is led by such industries as textiles, plastics, metal-working, engineering, and electrical goods, which dominate in the output and export of manufactures, and this large-scale portion of industry is expanding faster than the rest.
Technology has come to stay, and a permanent need for a related system of technical education has come with it. Un- ̧ fortunately the demand for industrial manpower is not met by the supply, even at elementary skilled and semi-skilled operative levels. According to Labour Department statistics, in June of last year there were 6,000 declared vacancies in "selected major industries", but the recently exposed ITAC (Industrial Training Advisory Committce) Report on the Tex- tile Industry indicates a shortage of nearly 6,000 operatives in that industry alone. At skilled operative, craftsman, and tech- nician levels there is often a lag between the "introduction of complex new processes and the provision of workers educated to carry them out. But in Hongkong the situation has been made to look critical.
Industrialists, technical teachers and other people profes sionally concerned by the state of industrial training are naturally its most forceful advocates. The main body of the ITAC findings has not yet (and may never) come to light, and in the absence of such a unit-by-unit analysis these 'pres- sure groups' have elevated the cause for technical education to the status of a missionary crusade. The individual indus- trialist is less inclined to lament a shortage of technical ex- pertise, or take direct steps to eliminate it, than his illustrious colleagues in the HKFI (Hongkong Federation of Industries) and the CMA (Chinese Manufacturers Association), who oc casionally feel obliged to comment on the state of industry ex cathedra. It is perhaps significant that the main (and virtually the only) advocate of greatly increased technical training for girls is both a woman and a senior member of the HKFI. A brief glance at the Labour Department figures shows that although most of the declared vacancies are for females, they are nearly all at operative levels-assemblers in the plastics and electronics industries requiring no formal training.
Last month James Wu, managing director of China Cold Storage and Engineering Ltd and a prominent member of the ITAC, told the Urban Council that industry needs 'at least' 3,820 technicians and 9,750 craftsmen each year. Dr S. Y. Chung, chairman of the HKFI, himself a qualified en- gineer, has put the need for qualified technologists and technicians at between 2,000 and 2,500 a
year. These figures are based on the existing ratios of the technical grades, and weighted to keep abreast with increasingly specialised production methods. It may well be asked whether these estimated vacancies for technical per. sonnel are not unduly sanguine, since they are based on the assumption that everyone doing the work of a technician or a craftsman must have formal training and qualifications; to that level.
The By-Census showed textiles, the largest industry of all, with 139,000 people employed in its modern sector, of whom only 510 were 'professional staff and qualified technolo gists'. In the modern sector of the whole economy, the
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nuinber of professional staff and qualified technologists was 32,900. Of these, 29,620 (a staggering proportion) were found to be working in the 'Community Service' category: the re- mainder were spread thinly and evenly through commerce, communications, public utilities, construction and manufac- turing industries. The proportion of industrially oriented and employed technologists in the group must be minute, for the Hongkong Technical College and the Hongkong University produced only about 230 technology graduates of all kinds last year, and that was a record. Up to and including 1965, none of the University's mechanical engineering graduates entered Chinese-run manufacturing industry, although a few entered firms like Taikoo Dockyard and Engineering Co Ltd, Hong- kong Electric Co Ltd, and Jardine Matheson and Co Ltd,
Of 68 technologists graduated by Hongkong Univer- sity last year, 35 read civil engineering which does not normally lead into industry. The Department of Engineering plans to increase the output of mechanical and electrical en- gineers to 85 by 1970, but to judge from past practice only a few of them will choose industrial careers in the Colony. Most manufacturers in Hongkong, we are told, are too 'ignorant to appreciate the advantages of having a technologist or two on the staff, and in fact Hongkong indus- try in general has a comparatively low requirement for such highly qualified men. Long-term investments like the research and development service of a technologist are not much in demand in an economy based on essentially short-term plans. Technological developments are imported largely by parent companies overseas, as in the case of the transistor radio in- dustry, which gets its technical edge by arrangement with research and development sources in the US.
The few locally-produced technologists and engineers go for the better money in Government and consultative work, which may pay upwards of $1,500 a month to start with, while industry offers as little as $700 to $900, with the promise of future increases beyond those expected in other fields. Manu- facturers explain that they cannot afford to pay a man more until he has been in industry long enough to become a pro- fitable investment. There is animosity against technical graduates, with their theoretical bias and reputed reluctance to "muck in" with the humdrum processes of production. Neither the employers nor the freshly-recruited graduates scem to appreciate the need for practical training in work-
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Students study knit- ting technology on machines at the Technical College which con be pro- grammed to train workers in several aspects of industry.
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