HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL · 1 March 1990
香港立法局
一九九○年三月一日
11
Additional recent transition is seen in cuts to defence spending. After more than 40 years of the longest, biggest, and most widely spread arms race in world history, arms are now recognized as counterproductive. They drain economic performance and economic development. And economics is today's world linchpin. We have become transnational.
Things do change. And we are faced with new realities. The entire world is taking on a new vision. Increasingly, sovereign national governments are finding they have to be reactive rather than proactive. They have been drawn into the new transnational world.
Let us hope that China will soon recognize this new age of national governments' participating transnationally. In this way Hong Kong can move more smoothly from a British colony and from this intervening period of fighting for our identity — to 1997 when, in effect, we become an international division of "China, Inc.". We are to be in a subsidiary relationship with our head office. As such, we will be working for the same broader good and welfare of the people of Hong Kong and eventually Greater China.
From a world perspective, this transnational impact evolved through several eras. We have by-passed the mechanical model of technology brought in with the industrial revolution. We went as far as we could go with the ultimate source of power, atomic energy replicated in 1945 with atomic fission. We have crested the information age with information technology as the organizing principle for work. It is hard to believe that the first computer came on stream as long ago as 1946, when we now enjoy, as commonplace, telecommunication technology with our portable phones, fax machines, and satellite television coverage. In cresting the information age, we have embarked on the transnational era.
The cold war ended in the last years of the 1980s, and the arms race has been slowed through improved relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union. The postwar period of nationalism and ideological differences has been replaced by globalization. The worldwide shift from authoritarian regimes to democracy will lay the political groundwork for further economic growth. The world is undergoing a shift from economies managed by governments to economies run by markets. Democracy is by far the most successful context in which to nourish entrepreneurship and successful economies. Peace, not war; global trade, not protectionism, will see us through the 1990s and into the new millennium.
While the proposed political system for Hong Kong is not perfect, it does enable us to set the wheels of democracy in motion. So now we must do our
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