Talent is the key to success in a knowledge-based economy. So says Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen in an opinion piece published on this page on Monday. He may be right but he leaves us with some difficulty in deciphering exactly what his self-coined aphorism means.
Mr Tsang coined it to justify government stimulus of his six pet industries - medicine, education, industrial testing, innovation and technology, culture, and environment. In reviewing his published work, he may have found an immediate rebuff to one of those six from a former colleague, legislator Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, whose regular column appeared on the same page that day.
'It is mind-boggling how 'innovation and technology', which cuts across all sectors, can be put forward as an 'economic area' in itself,' she wrote. 'From providers of services to producers of traditional manufactured goods or trendier tech products, everybody needs to make greater use of innovation and technology to create value.'
Spot on, madam. You've got it (at last). The brain is used for more than just making microcircuits. All economies are knowledge-based.
Some occupations obviously require greater training and intellectual ability than others, but they are not necessarily the ones that do best for us. Technology and innovation, for instance, is a hugely risky field with very thin profit margins, if any.
Singapore has discovered what a false dream hi-tech can be with its big government-sponsored loser, Chartered Semiconductor, as has Shanghai with another money sinkhole, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). We were almost saddled with SMIC 10 years ago but none other than Mr Tsang told its founders to go elsewhere for handouts. Let's sing his praises when he earns them.
And let's not when he doesn't. The bigger problem with his six pet industries, aside from matters of definition (culture an industry?), is that they are mostly yesterday's ideas and someone else's. Bangkok has scored big with medical tourism, as has Bombay. Thus, let's do it too. Britain has long sold education to foreigners. Let's have Oxbridge in Hong Kong.