bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Jake Van Der Kamp

'Government policies on land, technology and education were  at the heart of a catalogue of failures spanning 40 years, Lingnan University president Edward Chen Kwan-yiu said yesterday.'

SCMP

June 7

AN INTERESTING THESIS this, but it doesn't quite hold up on closer scrutiny. Let's start with Professor Chen's contention that we are hooked on property.

'We are overdependent on land - physically, psychologically and emotionally,' he said in a speech on Tuesday. 'Directly or indirectly, the rough estimate is that over 80 per cent of our government revenue is related to land.'

Rough estimate, indeed. The highest figure I can get is 32 per cent of operating revenue, even after treating 40 per cent of profits tax as land-related. I can push it to about 45 per cent of total revenue by including the capital works reserve fund but this is definitely a separate item. The fund's revenues are dedicated to capital works. Give me a hand here, Professor Chen. How do I get it up to 80 per cent?

A better way of assessing our property dependency is to calculate what proportion of gross domestic product comes from building and construction plus related costs. The present figure for this is 8.6 per cent of GDP and it is the lowest I can find on record. Yes, we may talk a lot about property but the  facts say that when we go to work, we make our money in other ways. Buying property is one of the things we do with the money we then earn but our economy is not based on property.

And it should hardly be surprising that we have an emotional attachment to property. For most of us our homes are the biggest single purchase we make in our lives. This is true around the world by the way, not just in Hong Kong.

So let us deal next with the ways we earn our money. Professor Chen's contention is that we have short-changed ourselves by opting for  low-technology services instead of building high-technology industries through heavy investment in research.

'Today we are lagging behind and I am quite convinced that it is no accident that we encountered so many economic and other problems after 1997,' he says.

Now, in case you wondered, this is defined as a 'sweeping assertion'. What you do with a sweeping assertion is you say something obvious, for instance, that Hong Kong's economy is based on trade and then you say: 'This proves we got it all wrong.'

There is a step or two of logic missing here. The object of economic enterprise is to build prosperity and spread it as widely as possible. If  hi-tech serves that purpose best, very well, we should perhaps have done better to opt for  hi-tech.

But I have a reworked old Scottish song for you on that score:

'Oh, you take the hi-tech

And I'll take the lo-tech

And I'll be wealthy before you'

Prosperity is about building wealth and  hi-tech is unfortunately a poor way of going about it. Hi-tech is mostly about building national prestige. What you get from it in terms of wealth is only high risk and poor return. Look at how Singapore struggles to make any real money from its choice of the  hi-tech route.

Meantime, our lo-tech service exports have proved hugely profitable. Services are what we do best and we do them very well. We have made ourselves rich on them.

And, while we're on the subject, don't be fooled by the common perception that hi-tech requires brains and service industries do not.

A banker or an export-import agent needs to put much more brainpower at work in his job than does a technician who pushes buttons on an imported piece of production machinery, however fancy the machine and however clean and brightly lit the room in which he does it.

Finally, we have Professor Chen's assertion that we got it wrong in education. His complaints, among others, are that A-levels are overspecialised and schools should have specific lessons in English grammar.

First, these educationalists swing one way and then they swing the other. A-levels should be specialised. No, they shouldn't. Yes, they should. No, they shouldn't. Yes, they should. All that results is that the kids themselves get swung dizzy.

Meanwhile, they ignore that the International Baccalaureate  programme is sweeping A-levels away and that many of our English teachers cannot themselves pass English proficiency exams. Never mind. Educationalists love to wrap themselves in administrative tangles. Let them have their tempest in a teapot.

But Professor Chen also complains of 'tremendous cuts' in university budgets since 1997. Yes, there were such cuts and I have a simple response - Amen, we sure swung the axe well that time.

And we need to keep swinging it for as long as university graduates show up in numbers at airline job fairs, applying to put years of education to work in reciting 'Beef or chicken, Sir?' as flight attendants. This sort of thing is firm proof that we have overinvested in universities and betrayed their graduates.

Perhaps we could start those cuts with a small second-rate college on Stubbs Road that moved to Tuen Mun and now calls itself Lingnan University.



Let others take the hi-tech route, we're doing just fine with lo-tech