Feature: 'Bridges' with Mainland Being Built for Vast Business Opportunities

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, September 01, 2002

Feature: 'Bridges' with Mainland Being Built for Vast Business Opportunities

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Hsu Yuk King, the director of a local China business consultancy firm told Xinhua that China's imminent accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) a few years ago inspired her to set up her own business.

Hsu, with 10 years of accounting experience, is definitely one of those who were illuminated early about the bright business prospect on the Chinese mainland, and thereby started her own business offering bridging services for China trade, such as helping foreign firms set up companies in mainland or in Hong Kong.

Surviving in a changing world economic situation, where China has already entered the WTO, Hsu stressed that the people of the Hong Kong SAR particularly need to improve their linguistic bridges with the mainland by emulating good Putonghua - the official Chinese language.

"Emulating good Putonghua takes more than just rolling the tongue for certain Chinese words, as some people still think this is all it takes," she said.

In fact Putonghua is becoming so increasingly popular here that the British Council, which is supposed to promote just the British culture, recently promote the Chinese language too. The council isobviously taking advantage of the huge demand for the Chinese language in the market.

The council told Xinhua that it has already been running a range of Chinese language classes of different levels on all days of the week with good attendance.

Youngsters in the United Kingdom are no less eager to build bridges with China. Capitalizing on the demand for the Chinese culture there, the British Council recently ran a Beijing summer camp for 134 UK high school students and their teachers to attend a three-week language immersion summer camp at Central University for Nationalities in Beijing.

"Chinese is now the fastest growing modern foreign language in the UK schools, and I anticipate the new General Certificate for Secondary Education (GCSE) in Putonghua to be introduced to the UKin 2003," said Richard Everitt, the council's school links manager of the British Council in Beijing said.

But Hsu Yuk King told Xinhua that just as important as the linguistic competency in the Chinese language is the quality of flexibility and adaptability. She advised that not only do Hong Kong people need to refresh their knowledge by attending evening school in a world which calls for lifelong education, but more importantly, they should also hone their analytical and problem solving faculty.

Even the civil servants in Hong Kong recently organized the Civil Servants Management Forum for their fellow colleagues to have an away day for workshops to sharpen their mind in order to make more appropriate policies for Hong Kong's future.

With Hong Kong SAR's prosperity hinging on prosperity of the mainland economy, the civil servants were encouraged to trope on such a theme and brainstorm analytically on how this theme will affect their policy making to better Hong Kong's future.

And thus came the news Friday that a rail line bridge linking the Hong Kong SAR with the Macao Special Administrative Region and the Pearl River Delta or Zhuhai on the mainland, is being considered by the Hong Kong SAR government.

HKSAR government sources revealed that the proposed linkage would include a road as well, and that the government is looking at the feasibility of such a plan to boost the pace of integration of trade, logistics and tourism on a regional scale.

The disclosure followed the HKSAR Financial Antony Leung's earlier comment that a bridge was necessary for deeper integration of Hong Kong's economy with the Pearl River Delta.

Source: Xinhua

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