ENG-1991 — Page 27

A COMPLETELY NEW PORT

All these subject areas are important. But more pertinent than any of them is the South China setting. The full significance of the port-creation process can only be clearly perceived in the China context.

For a summary of the setting we can usefully turn to three quotations, all from talks given to audiences far from Hong Kong.

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There has been, and there will be, huge development in Hong Kong's economic relationship with the Mainland of China, for whom we are the major entrepôt, the best deepwater port, the busiest airport and the major source of outside investment and processing skills.

The Pearl River delta and the coastal provinces of China, with Hong Kong as their hub, are going to be a key area of growth, in China and Asia, over the next 20-30 years. We see ourselves as the service base for a rapidly-developing South China industrial heartland. And we see ourselves at the centre of a network of international commercial links which have tremendous opportunities for growth. In short, we see Hong Kong as the leading trade and financial centre in the region.

The speaker, in all three instances, was the Governor - addressing audiences in New York, Paris and Rome in the last two years. Sir David, it may be objected, is a biased depicter of a broad and wide-ranging scene. Let us narrow the focus to Guangdong Province, of which Hong Kong is a geographical part, and look at what has been happening there.

In recent years something akin to an economic miracle has been taking place in the province, which has a population of about 65 million. Gross Domestic Product has grown by an average of 12 per cent a year since 1979, making the province a front-runner as a manufacturer and exporter. In 1990, it sold about US$10.6 billion worth of goods overseas, more than any other province, representing 21 per cent of China's national total.

To this growth Hong Kong has contributed significantly. It now accounts for more than 70 per cent of foreign investment in the province. Hong Kong investors employ three million people there, four times the size of Hong Kong's own manufacturing workforce.

Guangdong's planners, like Hong Kong's, have not been idle. They have a port development programme of their own, with which the PADS staffs are fairly familiar for they have had to take these projects into account. Correspondingly, planning and other professionals in Guangdong are conversant with Hong Kong's port development plans and their implications.

This can hardly be otherwise, since information about the respective plans has for a long time been shared at meetings - sometimes between individuals, sometimes between groups that have taken place at various levels, formal and informal. But before iden- tifying the new ports which are being developed up-river, between here and Guangzhou, we must take another brief look back at the past.

Economically, the most unnatural period in Hong Kong's history (excluding the wartime occupation by Japan, from 1941 to 1945) was the 1950s and 1960s. From the foundation of Hong Kong in 1841 the China trade was the nucleus of all business activity in the territory, and the harbour both existed and developed as the entrepôt for China. Then, in 1951, came the United Nations embargo, resulting from the Korean War, that proscribed the importation into China of a wide range of 'strategic' materials.

Entrepôt activity was not utterly extinguished. Regional shipments and transhipments increased and some of the China trade went underground, though how much was smuggled

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