OpinionFrom China's one-child policy and 'one belt, one road' initiative, to the HKU appointment saga, official explanations fall short

Never let facts get in the way of a good story. There have been quite a few examples in recent days. Take the official replacement of China's one-child policy with "no more than two". Everything reads as though the policy, however cruel and antisocial, had worked. The reality: it was seldom enforced outside cities. Otherwise, how could China have continued to have a fertility rate which only fell below 2 around 1995 and is still around 1.65, with a rural rate of around 2 offset by a very low urban rate - the norm in urban east Asia, with Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Japan all around the 1.2 to 1.3 mark? All the facts tell us that China's realities are very different from policies announced with much fanfare, and sometimes enforced with a mindlessness that defies comprehension.

The steepest fall in China's fertility rate, from about 6 to 3, occurred in the decade before the one-child policy. Overall, for the past 40 years, China's fertility rate has almost exactly paralleled that of Thailand, which has urbanised at a roughly similar rate. Thailand never had a policy beyond discussing sex publicly and handing out cheap condoms to encourage family planning. The one difference is that Thailand does not suffer from the gender bias that afflicts China, with 12-15 per cent more boys than girls among those born in the past 25 years. Don't blame that on the one-child policy, but on China's Confucian culture. Perhaps this explains why Confucian culture never made progress in societies beyond China's neighbours, Korea, Vietnam and Japan.

So, will the "one belt, one road" slogan do any better in spreading Chinese culture to the west and south? The barrage of media coverage has been impressive. Hong Kong is being urged to take advantage of this Great Leap Forward in China's global role. The plan tells us to do this not by engaging directly with the nations being linked but by intensifying cooperation with mainland provinces that want to compete with Hong Kong. This is nonsense.

Hong Kong has no natural links with the Silk Road across Central Asia. It never did. The cities of southern coastal China, whether Guangzhou, Quanzhou , Xiamen or Hong Kong, flourished because they were the outlet to the sea routes to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and Europe. It was longer but mostly more reliable than overland and, with steamships, became much cheaper. If Beijing wants to build railways through the hills and disputed boundaries of the states of the Caucasus for mainly political reasons, that is fine. It won much kudos by building the Tanzania-Zambia railway so it barely matters now that the railway barely functions.

Now China has started to build a railway from Mombasa to Nairobi in Kenya to replace one allowed to decay. Good luck. But Hong Kong's focus in trade and services should be on the populous countries to the west and south. Central Asia has relatively few attractions.