ENG-1990 — Page 26

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SHAPING UP FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Big money and tough law is now directed at improving the environment. The loss of industrial production from cleaning up is generally accepted. The stricter regulations will add to the increasing cost of labour as an incentive to move certain industrial processes to China. Even so we cannot look to the future with complacency. No sooner is one form of pollution identified and dealt with than another springs up out of what seemed to be an innocent activity. Hong Kong will become increasingly involved with environmental control in China because borders are not relevant in this context. Regional and worldwide measures will probably have to be taken to combat new threats.

If there is one lesson that has been brought home in the last twenty years it is that pollution prevention is a great deal easier than pollution cure. Even so it will require a brave government to listen to the scientists before the mess they warn about suffocates us.

Earning a Living

To say that there will be new opportunities for the development of a more pleasing city is not to say that the means will automatically be available. The average growth over the last thirty years has been between eight per cent and nine per cent, dipping below six per cent on only three occasions in 1967, 1974 and 1984 before the present slow-down.

There is nothing automatic about growth. It is not a thing that a government can do much about, except stop it, and in Hong Kong we are very much exposed to external influences. These external influences have been of fundamental importance in the way the economy has changed and will no doubt go on being so. Established as a entrepôt, Hong Kong lived by trade until the United Nations embargo on trade with China in 1950 put a stop to our principal means of earning a living. Stimulated by the Shanghai industrialists, who fled from China in 1949, industry grew up and flourished. In the seventies, financial services came to be more important. The recession at the beginning of the eighties was offset by the re-opening of China and a new start for our traditional role as entrepôt. In recent years, a shortage of labour in Hong Kong and the open door policy in China has led to the industrialists moving many of their operations into southern China.

The long period of isolation of Hong Kong from China from 1949 to about 1976 was quite extraordinary. During this time of isolation Hong Kong might almost have been a Pacific island, miles from China, except for the exports of food and agricultural products that China sent out. Nothing went in except money which constituted a large proportion of China's foreign exchange earnings. Until the late seventies the only way into China from Hong Kong was to walk across the railway bridge at Lo Wu. There were no road, rail, air or sea communications for passengers. It is reflection of priorities on both sides that the first direct flight from China to Hong Kong was a chartered cargo plane. It was loaded with Shanghai crabs.

The isolation extended to the movement of people. The controls on movement were in China itself so that it was not easy to get anywhere near the border area. With the relaxation of controls on movement in China and, at that time, our policy of not sending back illegal immigrants found in the city, more and more came in. Between 1978 and 1980 nearly 400 000 people (both legal and illegal immigrants) did so. Then the door was closed more firmly than it has ever been before.

The end of the isolation has sprung from China's open door policy. Take a large, poor labour force, place it alongside a rich industrial settlement and interaction is inevitable once the two groups can communicate especially when they all speak Cantonese. The