Hong Kong to Benefit from China's WTO EntryChina's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will bring about tremendous business opportunities for Hong Kong, a senior official of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (SAR) said Wednesday.Mike Rowse, director general of Investment Promotion, said the economic scale of the Chinese mainland will expand greatly after China's WTO entry, and a thriving economy in China's mainland will provide Hong Kong with more cooperation opportunities. According to him, Hong Kong, as an international financial and trade center, will benefit from the increasing flow of foreign capital into the mainland in the way as most investment to North America going via New York. To take a market share in Hong Kong, he said, multinationals do not sit idle waiting for China to gain its WTO membership. Rather, they are quick to have their regional headquarters or representative office registered in Hong Kong by an average of one in every week, Rowse disclosed. After more than 20 years of reform and opening up, China has made substantial progress in expanding its economic scale resulting from efforts to transform its economic system. China has taken an active part in global economic activities, and its bilateral trade with the United States and Japan has increased by folds. Rowse said Hong Kong is known in the world for its free economy and in 1999, absorbed 23 billion U.S. dollars of foreign investment. The Hong Kong economy has begun to merge with that of the mainland, he said. At present the service industry accounts for 85 percent of Hong Kong's economy, with the share of the manufacturing industry dropping to about six percent. The major reason for this, he suggested, is the fact that many Hong Kong factories have been moved to the mainland, mainly the neighboring Guangdong Province, and thousands of Hong Kong people are working in the mainland. China will adopt more preferential policies to attract overseas investment and personnel to its vast western region, and Hong Kong will play the role of a bridge, he said. It is learned a delegation of officials and business people from Hong Kong will soon go to the western region to conduct an on- the-spot inspection and explore ways for cooperation between Hong Kong and the region. |
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