Hong Kong in the New Information Age

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am told that a little while ago the entire Supreme Court of Uganda took leave for a couple of weeks to go back to school to learn about computers and communications technology. They said that they were: "no longer equipped to judge a modern society without knowing these things".

Just think about that for a moment. The modern society they are talking about, Uganda, has a per capita GDP of around US$300. Yet it is becoming a part of the new information age just as surely as Hong Kong and the United States with their per capita GDPs exceeding US$25,000. Or rather, let's be more precise about the terms. It isn't a new information age. Information has always been there. What we have entered is an age of new access to information.

In times past, anyone who wanted knowledge had to come to where the libraries were. Dramatic though the printing revolution was in diffusing knowledge, physical proximity to the good libraries and bookshops remained critical to educational advance. Today, container housed telecoms offices with small satellite transceivers bring the libraries of the world into village schools from Kampala to Patagonia.

True, narrow bandwidth and old modems slow the flow of knowledge into a trickle at times. Congestion on the access ramps to the information super-highway makes traffic congestion on the Tuen Mun Highway, our first highway, seem negligible. Even in the United States, as an advert points out, it takes only 17 minutes for a picture from Mars to reach NASA, but it takes an hour and a half to download it from the NASA website. But that is just a passing, technical problem. In engineering terms it is easier to put in enough bandwidth to support real time audio-visual communication with Timbuctoo than to add another lane to the Tuen Mun Highway.

The flow of knowledge is not one way. Everyone, everywhere, has always had the ability to think different. In times past that has mostly happened in isolation. Today the widening networks of our communications are giving individuals opportunity to find kindred spirits a continent away; to share their thoughts; refine them through debate; advance their understanding. They are enabling more and more people to function as citizens of the world as well as citizens of their own particular place. They are giving people power to be their best.

Where is Hong Kong going to find itself in this new age of distributed knowledge?

There is an apparent paradox that even as technology is undermining the need for centres, the greatest stimulus for the new technology and for the acceptance of new ideas on how to use it, is coming from a few centres in which a variety of people and industries are tightly clustered. Hong Kong is used to the idea of clustering. Recent studies of what makes Hong Kong tick have all pointed to the huge advantage Hong Kong generates from the dense clustering here of the skills and resources needed for a state of the art service economy. Almost every component of the cluster, from legal and financial services or marketing, to personal management, transportation or design is benefiting in its own area from the new information and communication technology. That technology is also helping to tie them all together more strongly, to create new combinations of services, and to extend their reach to draw more clients and service providers into their web.

So I don't think Hong Kong has anything to fear from the spread of the world wide web. We are going to remain an agile and important spider within it, if I may overload the analogy so far.

The really interesting question is whether Hong Kong will become more than just a sophisticated user of the tools of a networked world: whether we develop as a producer of content and a source of innovation?

Rhetorical questions like that are often the prelude to the exposition of some grand plan that will deliver the result hinted at, aren't they? Or from other mouths, they prepare you for a stirring cry that the desiderata could be achieved "if only the Government would act!"

I don't have a grand plan. History is a charnel house for plans and programmes designed to promote far less complex and fast moving processes than the information revolution. But Governments are not spectators to the change that is underway. Their policies and programmes influence the process profoundly. Even in Hong Kong, where Government consumes less than 20 per cent of GDP and keeps its expenditure growth deliberately under tight control, we are a major purchaser of new communications systems and services based on them. Our requirements provide a strong incentive for research and innovation. We are not running a space programme or human genome project, but our need to upgrade health services and basic education, to improve communication within Government and to forge a better interface with the community all create demand for new technology and for innovation in its application. That basic demand raises potential for spin offs that can benefit the private sector or other parts of Government.

But far more important than purchases are policies - the framework that we lay down for people to explore the opportunities that the new means to access and to use information provide them with.

Here in Hong Kong, the framework we are building is an open one. We seek to expand customer choice and promote efficiency through free market competition - our recent arrangements to end Hong Kong Telecom's monopoly on international telephony is an example of this. Through new legislation and codes of practice we aim to protect personal privacy and to give individuals access to the data that is held about them. We are also vigorous in defending intellectual property and copyright. I deliberately mention these legal protections together as our commitment to free and open markets because they go inextricably together. Protection of individual rights and property is not a gate across the grand freeway to the interconnected information world of the future, it is a guide-rail that guards us from steering off the road. Personal freedoms and defined property rights are indispensable if free and open markets are to operate.

While these things are vital, I don't think that they are, by themselves, a guarantor that Hong Kong will be able to capitalise fully on the potential of the information age. The legal framework is like a seed. What, if anything, grows from it, depends upon the environment around it.

That thought opens up the scope of what Government should be doing to help Hong Kong grow in the information age. We need to be looking at education, at the intellectual and cultural climate in which people grow up here, and at the physical environment in which we ask them to live.

Those of you who live here will know of the massive investments that we are making to bring information technology into the class-room. That isn't just to teach children how to use computers. We aim to enliven the whole process of education. That's the crucial thing. If we just add learning computer skills to learning maths and languages, we won't have done very much. If we can expand the capacity of our education system to give to children self confidence; the ability to think and to learn for themselves; and the interest to go on learning, then we will have begun to build a stronger foundation for our city. That process must continue through our universities as well. If they become sausage machines to turn out set numbers of engineers, doctors or social workers we lose a great deal. A creative culture needs lively and informed citizens, willing to search out new directions, enjoying and contributing to all the life around them.

A city that wants to attract and keep lively and talented citizens doesn't just have to offer opportunity. The quality of the living environment is critical. Many factors contribute to that environment. Often there is tension among them. People want good transport networks, but they don't want to choke on increasing exhaust fumes. They want decent, peaceful living spaces, but they want to keep countryside for recreation. They want low taxes and high quality services. This is where Government activity can be most fruitful, finding a creative balance between competing demands.

We haven't been doing too badly on all those fronts. Our taxes are much lower and much simpler than almost anywhere else. Our services are wide ranging and steadily increasing in quality. Huge country-parks provide some counter-balance to our crowded city, while New Town and urban renewal programmes are improving the living conditions for tens of thousands each year. Expanding rail networks are providing a clean and fast alternative to road transport.

But each advance awakens new demands, and past achievements provide no relief from present problems. We will always have a very full agenda.

I'm very conscious, however, of a latent danger in an overly "can do" approach by Government. Each new commitment to do things by the Public Service doesn't just raise expectations, it diminishes assumptions that individuals can do things for themselves. That can be demoralising both for those in Government and for the idea of citizenship. For Government to function well in our increasingly complex civilisation, the public feeling that Government belongs to them, and is pursuing aims in which they place value, is vital. If people feel that they have surrendered initiative to an authority that stands apart from them, it doesn't just lead to apathy, it brings suspicions about the intent of that authority, suspicions that may frustrate even quite sensible policies.

We had an example of that in Hong Kong a decade or so ago, when a clever colonial official proposed to introduce electronic road pricing - using then cutting edge information technology. An eminently sensible idea. It was drowned by fears of intrusion into personal privacy. Not least was the fear that the record of car movements could be as revealing as the thank you letters that a New York jewellery firm sent to some of its best customers, only for the letters to be opened by their clients' wives, who found that their husbands had been buying jewels for ladies other than themselves.

Today's better technology can ensure that such fears have no substance, but we have to recognise that there is huge potential for information to be misused, and that the new technology greatly increases those risks even as it confers so many other benefits. If Government takes too strong a lead in pushing the application of information technology, it risks arousing fears about its intentions, not just among those whose jobs and assumptions are centred on the systems that surround older technology, but also among those who are enjoying the excitement of discovering the networked world for themselves.

At a technical, but no less important level, inevitably Government will tend to push the technology that it is familiar with. We are a big organisation in which high standards of reliability have to be met. Tried and tested systems, not promising prototypes are what we use. Clunky old Windows 3.1, not Mac 0S8 or Hot Java is our staple.

But, that catalogue of cautions brings me back to the positive role that Government does have to play in helping Hong Kong to grow into the new information age. We don't have to force the pace. Hot house plants don't last as long as those that are raised naturally in good soil. It's our job to till the soil, to allow the seeds of new ideas to break through; to ensure that there is plentiful fertiliser of good education; freedom of information and expression; sound laws that apply equally to all; and, not least, the sunshine of light taxes. Those are all commonplaces of good government, but they remain no less true for the information age. Unless we maintain that framework, Hong Kong won't be able to enjoy the full potential that the new age offers us. Nor will Hong Kong be able to fulfil its potential to contribute to the growth of the economy and the culture of our newly interconnected world.

One last point, it isn't going to be enough if just Government tries to maintain the framework. For example, all that we hope to achieve with education, we will not achieve if more parents don't start to work with more teachers to change the ferocious cramming which is what passes for education for too many children today. Education needs to be about building character as much as learning facts, about nurturing ability to make friends and make ethical judgements as well as add up accounts. It must be about awakening creativity. We are trying to stimulate new approaches to education, to open up choices, but we need parents, teachers - businessmen and companies even - to respond and use the new freedom and opportunity to create a better more stimulating environment for children.

This new age of access to knowledge holds out the promise of a more stimulating environment for everyone. Not a single standard to which each individual has to adapt themselves, but an environment that offers as much variety as people themselves possess. The value that we can each gain from that, and the value we add to the new environment are matters that involve some of the most important choices that Hong Kong's citizens have to make.

Thank you.