WHEN I THREW OUT a gratuitous barbed comment in this column last week about the Trade Development Council (TDC) having 'rag and clock exports on the brain' I just knew I would get it shot right back at me by Sarah Monks.
I knew it because she had warned me she would if I tried it on. Like Rip Van Winkle, I seem to have nodded off for a few years in my knowledge of what the TDC does, she wrote in a letter to the editor (Council does promote service exports, March 16). The letters editor took that Rip Van Winkle bit out, unfortunately.
I am not usually one to lose sleep about what my targets may shoot back at me but Sarah is different, not specifically because she is director of corporate communications at the TDC but because she was the news editor of the South China Morning Post when I first put in a brief stint back in pre-history.
Journalism, in case you did not know, is an occupation for lazy people but no one who worked for Sarah ever got a chance to prove it true. A news editor like that is very much like a good teacher. You know how it is. Even when that teacher has your children rather than you in her class you still sit upright in your chair when seeing her and say, 'Yes, Miss Jones, no, Miss Jones'. So having a go at Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa is one thing but when it is my old news editor on the subject of whether the TDC has taken proper account of the Hong Kong economy's shift to services, I feel a particular compulsion to make sure of my ground first.
I think I have.
Let us get it straight immediately that I do not think the TDC's emphasis on merchandise exports is for want of trying to adapt itself to service exports. The difficulty is one of opportunity rather than intent. There is simply much less for it to do in services. It is not like the days of putting clock-makers who had never set foot outside Hong Kong in touch with potential foreign buyers of those clocks.