Opening Ceremony of Asian IT Expo '98
Speech by Mr K C Kwong, Secretary for Information Technology and Broadcasting

16 September 1998

Mr. Tong, Mr. Lai, ladies and gentlemen,

I am very pleased to be invited to officiate at today's opening ceremony of the 9th Asian IT Expo. The Asian IT Expo is the annual showcase for the IT industry in Asia. It serves as a central gathering place for IT experts and businessmen where they can discuss the latest technology trend and explore ways to make the best use of IT to improve efficiency and enhance competitiveness. It also serves to inform end-users of developments in the latest and most advanced technological applications which help to improve our quality of life.

To all these end-users, the medium used for interfacing with the computers is of paramount importance. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to talk about the use of the Chinese language on the Internet.

With the ever increasing number of users all over the world, the Internet has become an important channel for communication, information sharing, on-line government services and electronic business. The Internet also provides enormous potential, not just for IT professionals who develop the technology and applications, but also for the business people as well who make use of this new technology to reach their customers, market their products and make deals.

But communication on the Internet is still based largely on the English language. This is only to be expected given the history of development of the Internet. However, the scene is changing rapidly as the use of the Internet spreads round the globe. In Asia, in particular, there is a growing demand for Chinese content on the Internet. Hong Kong, as a bilingual city, is well placed to provide Chinese language support for the development of applications and content for this purpose.

We in the Hong Kong SAR Government fully recognise this. Within the government, we have adopted a common Chinese character set to facilitate data exchange between government departments and the public. And, nearly all of our web sites now support both Chinese and English languages. Our current plan to deliver public services electronically, through the Internet and other communication channels, will also be enabled for communication in Chinese. We are also working closely with other governments and institutions under the aegis of the International Standards Organisation in the development of the ISO 10646 standard, which is an international coding standard aimed at encompassing characters of Asian languages into one single common character set.

But harmonisation of internal codes for Chinese characters is not enough. Equally important issues that demand immediate attention include the provision of more sophisticated and user-friendly conversion tools capable of supporting the use of traditional and simplified Chinese characters; the development of an efficient and effective mechanism for searching and retrieving information in either traditional and simplified Chinese characters on the Internet; and above all the provision of content in Chinese. All these require close collaboration between Government, the IT industry and academia. I am glad to say that to this end, everyone is pulling in the same direction.

I am sure participants at the 9th Asian IT Expo this week will not be slow in tackling the issues I have just outlined and I wish them every success in their efforts. Finally, I would like to wish you all a fruitful conference. Thank you.

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