The banking and monetary history of Hong Kong

The recent conference on Hong Kong banking and monetary history has brought together scholars from around the world, and has revealed a great deal of interesting research.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the conference entitled the "Banking and Monetary History of Hong Kong: Hong Kong's Current Challenges in Historical Perspective", which was jointly organised by the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research (HKIMR) and the University of Hong Kong's Centre of Asian Studies. My own contribution - on the origins and evolution of Hong Kong's Currency Board system - perhaps contained as much memory as history, although piecing together those distant events of the 1980s required some considerable archival research, as well a good deal of concentrated recollection. Some of the other participants went much further back into Hong Kong history, although the focus was mainly on events and developments since the Second World War. There were interesting and productive sessions on financial relations with Mainland China, monetary policy, the banking industry, and Hong Kong as an international financial centre. The conference programme and most of the papers have been made available on the HKIMR's website, and there are plans for a formal publication arising out of the conference.

The discussions, which were lively and sometimes controversial, looked to the future as well as to the past - a measure surely of how well the conference satisfied its aim of examining Hong Kong's current challenges in historical perspective. One of the main objectives of the HKIMR is to promote research on longer-term and wider policy issues of relevance to the monetary and financial development of Hong Kong and the Asia region. Much of this research draws on recent experience, and often involves examinations and comparisons of other jurisdictions. The Institute also takes the firm view that such research should also include deeper investigation into longer-term historical perspectives. With this in mind it has encouraged a number of projects on Hong Kong's monetary and financial history, the results of which may be found among its research papers. The Institute has also created a database on Hong Kong's economic history as a research tool for scholars.

Before this conference, there was some impression - certainly in my mind - that, with some distinguished exceptions, not a great deal of serious research had been done recently into Hong Kong's monetary, financial or economic history, at least not compared with the considerable, and growing, body of work on Hong Kong's political, social and cultural history. Indeed, one of the objectives of the conference was to stimulate such research. The impressive work produced for the conference has, I think, revealed that the field is flourishing, not just within Hong Kong, but also among scholars around the world. The strong turn-out at the conference is, I hope, an indication that the field will grow.

Whether we lean towards Edward Gibbon's view that there is "no way of judging of the future but by the past" or George Bernard Shaw's more cynical conclusion that "we learn from history that we learn nothing from history", there is no doubt in my mind of the importance of this research. It would perhaps be naïve to expect to find in history immediate solutions to today's or tomorrow's problems: the world has changed too much for that. But an examination of how things were, and how people behaved, under different conditions helps us to form a much larger view of the present, and to consider questions that might not otherwise have occurred to us. It also shows, most strikingly in the history of Hong Kong, that change and vicissitude and uncertainty are the normal course of human experience, and not exceptions to it.

Joseph Yam
19 April 2007

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