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Thriving on idiosyncrasy

Tony Latter

In the early 1990s, I was involved with a number of financial reform programmes for nations in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union that were emerging from the yoke of communism. Not surprisingly, there was a fair measure of scepticism regarding reform. Advice was not always accepted or, if it was, it was not necessarily implemented, especially if it threatened vested interests.

I recall one country where a repeated reluctance to launch even half-radical reforms was supported by homilies along the lines of 'but our nation is different'. Officials elaborated with rather spurious arguments about how their history, culture or even geography rendered inapplicable to them many of the values and principles of developed, capitalist, market-based economies, whose ranks they nevertheless aspired to join.

There was a passing irony in the fact that many involved in the dialogue may already have had their hands in the till in a spectacularly capitalist fashion. Sadly, but predictably, that country subsequently limped along well behind most of its peer group in terms of economic progress.

This is not to say that external advice should necessarily be taken on board without challenge. Hong Kong owes much of its prosperity to having resisted conformity to what were, transiently at least, received wisdoms elsewhere.

We can be thankful that in the decades following the second world war, which was a key formative period for Hong Kong, the British authorities did not press for their flirtations with ideological socialism and over-development of a sprawling welfare state to be replicated here. Hong Kong was also largely untouched by several other unenviable British traits, including suffocation of excellence in education and erosion of family values.

Now, along comes intensified globalisation, which produces both diversity and uniformity. On the one hand, it facilitates specialisation, which is generally beneficial in terms of greater global efficiency in economic activity. On the other hand, it tends, by demonstration, learning, peer pressure or competitive forces, to encourage - though not always to deliver - more homogeneity. One sees many and diverse examples of this process of convergence; in attitudes to protection of the environment; concepts of social justice; technical standards; business regulation; operation of financial markets, and so forth.

In Hong Kong, it is partly thanks to this homogenising tide, overcoming different combinations of false pride, vested interests and occasionally sheer stubbornness, that we have seen a reorientation of official attitudes towards such things as heritage preservation, racial discrimination, government borrowing and even al fresco dining.

How long, one wonders, might it be before we add to that list, say, a competition law and exploitation of the harbour to a standard comparable to other leading waterside cities? And why can we not also mirror much of the rest of the world in truly positive proclamations, backed by appropriate action, of the importance of English as the language of business and leisure? Instead, we have half-hearted urgings delivered with what often seems to be a tinge of embarrassment about championing anything associated with the colonial past.

Even so, we must not be too hasty in abandoning our idiosyncrasies; and in an increasingly homogenised world, it will be an ever-growing challenge to identify the distinctive characteristics which need preserving, and then to preserve them.

Hong Kong, for instance, ought not to yield in its determination to remain distinctive for such things as low taxes and small government. The moral is, of course, that every policy has to be judged on its own merits, assessed in the Hong Kong context. 'We're not doing that because we're different' is not acceptable as grounds for inaction, any more than one should accept 'we're doing this because others do it' as grounds for action.

Tony Latter is a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong

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