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Jake Van Der Kamp

Cast your mind back to the white heat of technology. British prime minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase and he wanted so much to be part of it that, together with his French counterpart, he launched one of the great commercial bombs of the century, the Concord.

 You cannot entirely blame him.

 Fancy aircraft were the leading edge of technology just then along with the affiliated Man On The Moon drive.

 Britain wanted to be part of it all.

 In the end, of course, it was that American walrus, the Boeing 747, rather than the sleek Concord, which flew away with the commercial honours in this race.

 Britain got itself a loser for a handful of stressed businessmen and the British taxpayers got the white heat. They got burnt.

 Today the white heat of technology is the Internet and the Hong Kong Government now wants to take a leaf out Mr Wilson's book.

 Welcome to Cyberport, a techno-speak dreamworld introduced by Financial Secretary Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, in his Budget on Wednesday.

 Now, first of all, this 26-hectare development with a big chunk of luxury housing and with the land granted free was proposed to the Government only two months ago.

 A tremendous amount of planning has obviously gone into it.

 Secondly, it was once again a private deal for which others did not have an opportunity to bid, and Mr Tsang did not announce in his speech with whom the deal was struck.

 It turns out to be the Pacific Century Group of Richard Li Tzar-kai, son of big-time developer Li Ka-shing.

 This is interesting, because Mr Tsang also announced that the Town Planning Board has given approval in principle to a cruise terminal development at North Point proposed by a private-sector developer.

 You ask the question, do you?  Well, yes, once again he did not say who snared this private deal into which others did not get a look-see and a Government spokesman yesterday also declined to reveal the name. But the word is out anyway. It is a joint venture led by Li Ka-shing's Cheung Kong.

 Well done, Mr Tsang. It was a high afternoon for the Li family, a quinella, no less.

 Of course, it may be unfair to pin this one on Mr Tsang alone.

 He speaks for the entire Government in a Budget and Cyberport seems to have more of the thumb-print of his boss, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, who takes an interest in digital glory and recently travelled to Israel, of all places, to brief himself on it.

 It is a duff idea for the simple reason that concrete, steel and glass do not produce better neural connections in the brain.

 Go back over the big creative advances in digital technology of recent years and you will find that most of them came from brilliant unknowns working with ad hoc equipment in their garages.

 What is more, it does not need to be done in Hong Kong for Hong Kong to benefit. These advances travel across the world at the speed of light, and what we need is the entrepreneurial spirit and the capital to take advantage of them as they come past us.

 We have plenty of that and we don't need to push it into a corner of Pokfulam. It would be better, in fact, that we do not. It will create strictures, not loosen them.

 The danger is that, instead of becoming a digital brains trust, we will find ourselves wasting a great deal of effort to perform digital drudgery.

 There is plenty of competition in this field in Asia: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's Multimedia Corridor, for instance, or the immense lead Taiwan has built up in electronics.

 The international corporate leaders in the business will play the game by their profit-and-loss accounts. They will give us a little if we pay them a lot. It is highly unlikely, however, that they will give us their best.

 Mr Tsang delivered a good budget but this was not one of its good parts.



Cyberport plan points to issues of Concord