The wisdom to know when not to interfere
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.
But second-hand ideas are invariably what you get with economic planning of this sort, particularly when bureaucrats are given a heavy role. Very few successful industries have ever been planned. The winners are never devised. They evolve.
Just think of where we might be now if we had tried devising today's economy 40 years ago. We would still be mired in poverty, wondering why we got it so wrong in holding on to textiles dyeing, plastic flower gluing, pot bashing and ship crewing. No planning agency had financial and trade services in mind 40 years ago. They evolved and made this city's fortune as the brainchildren of hard-headed entrepreneurs working out new ideas through trial and error. There was no Task Force on Economic Challenges to get in their way. Let us all be grateful.
And matters are no different now. When 7 million land-starved people have no natural resources to sell to others, they must live on their wits and have faith that necessity is still the mother of invention. The odds are that anyone reviewing the past 40 years from now will also say of Mr Tsang's industrial prescriptions: 'Whew! Glad we didn't do that.'
But that can only be said if Mr Tsang does now as his predecessors did 40 years ago, which is to leave it to those entrepreneurs to work out through the marketplace what industries will suit Hong Kong best in the future. But, the evidence is that he is cluttering their way with ever bigger interventions to push currently fashionable industries and then citing these to justify massive overinvestment in infrastructure projects that serve little purpose other than sweetening functional constituencies.
Our economy will always be knowledge-based, Mr Tsang, but the talent it needs will do better if you make it less of your job to interfere.
Jake van der Kamp is a former Post columnist
