Speech by Mr. Y C Cheng, Acting Director of Information Technology Services at the 18th International Unicode Conference on
26 April 2001

Ms Moore, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning. It is an honour and a great pleasure for me to address the opening of the 18th International Unicode Conference. I am very pleased to see such a prominent and influential gathering of international and local IT experts at this conference. This is truly an important annual event of the global IT industry. On behalf of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, I would like to extend my warmest welcome to conference delegates to this exciting city of the Orient.

Since 1991, the Unicode Consortium has been instrumental in defining and promoting the Unicode standard, an international character encoding standard that provides a technical foundation for the internationalization of software products across the world. The Unicode Consortium also cooperates with the International Organisation for Standardisation, the ISO in short, for maintaining full synchronisation between the Unicode standard and the ISO 10646 standard.

The annual International Unicode Conference is a valuable opportunity for the world-wide IT community to come together and share information and experiences on current topics related to the Unicode, the web, software development, multi-lingual applications, fonts, characters, etc. More importantly, it provides a forum for industry and users to exchange information and ideas about applications based on these standards.

Hong Kong has long been an international centre for trade, commerce, finance, business, transport and tourism. We are a service-oriented economy, with the service sector accounting for over 80% of our GDP. In terms of economic freedom, the Heritage Foundation in November 2000 ranked Hong Kong as the world's freest economy for the seventh successive year. We have a level playing field for business, an independent judiciary, an open and accountable government, a clean civil service and a duty-free port. There is no control over capital and information flow, and no control over ideas and innovation. There are also no tariff barriers to the trading of goods.

Speaking of the flow of information and trade, we have witnessed the tremendous impact that the Internet and e-commerce have had in re-shaping our everyday business activities and personal lives in recent years. The Internet has enabled businesses to be conducted and people to communicate electronically all over the world. Companies can now reach out to new markets and customers on the cyberspace. There are occurrences of dis-intermediation as well as re-intermediation between buyers and sellers resulting in the creation of added values for both the merchants and the consumers. According to industry estimates, revenue generated by e-commerce will amount to US$7 trillion by 2004 and there are currently over 300 million Internet users worldwide. Opportunities are certainly abundant in the cyberspace.

For Hong Kong, the total value of e-commerce transactions is expected to grow from US$2 billion in 2000 to US$70 billion in 2004. Over half of our households have personal computers. One third of our population are Internet users. The London-based Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked our e-commerce readiness amongst the top 10 in the world. Forrester Research has forecast that Hong Kong will be among the leading group of economies in the Asia Pacific region to register e-commerce hyper-growth. Such achievements could only come about if our businesses adopt a global perspective and pursue internationalisation of their products and services on an ongoing basis. To this end an infrastructure that supports e-business through the adoption of international standards is a very important factor for success. To put these into perspective, I would like to share with you some of our recent IT developments and the role that standards like Unicode can play.

In late 1998, our Government published the "Digital 21" Information Technology Strategy with the objective to enhance and promote Hong Kong's information infrastructure and services so as to make Hong Kong a leading digital city in the globally connected world of the 21st century. Under the strategy, we have put in place the essential infrastructure built on open and common standards to facilitate the development of e-commerce in the local community and with the outside world. We are revising this strategy to take account of industry developments and global best practices.

In January 2000, our legislature enacted the Electronic Transactions Ordinance that gives the same legal status to electronic records and digital signatures as their paper-based counterparts. The law also provides the framework for the setting up of a voluntary certification authorities recognition scheme in Hong Kong. We have since set up our local public key infrastructure through the establishment of a public certification authority. The interoperability of our public key infrastructure, including digital certificates and the integrity of electronic records, with our international business counterparts is an area that will benefit from standardisation in coding and use. This is also something which Unicode can help.

Earlier this year, we launched the Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) scheme that provides on-line public services to the community over the Internet and through kiosks that are installed throughout Hong Kong. Over 70 government and public services are now available under this scheme, including payment of government fees, submission of tax return for individuals, voter registration, renewal of driving and vehicle licences, etc. In the area of electronic procurement, the Government's Electronic Tendering System has been in operation since last year. This is one of the world's first web-based government procurement systems and it allows suppliers from all over the world to receive notification of tenders, submit tender offers and receive notification of tender awards through the Internet. A major characteristic of the ESD scheme is that it is hosted on a truly bilingual platform supporting both English and Chinese. As such, consistent multi-lingual support is an important component in its development. ESD is a flagship initiative and a pre-cursor to a number of e-Government initiatives that will be taken forward shortly.

We believe a robust and versatile e-business infrastructure is a critical success factor for e-commerce to flourish in Hong Kong. A cornerstone of our e-business infrastructure is the adoption of international standards and best practices for ensuring that our infrastructure is interoperable with the outside world. For example, our public key infrastructure is built upon the X.509 standard that is published by the Internet Engineering Task Force and that specifies the format and semantics of digital certificates and certificate revocation lists. The X.509 standard is widely adopted internationally allowing PKI implementations in different parts of the world to work with each other on the basis of a common and compatible technical framework.

I would also like to mention our adoption of the Unicode standard or its equivalent, i.e. the ISO 10646 standard, which is closely related to the theme of this conference.

One of the initiatives under the Government's "Digital 21" IT Strategy is to provide an open and common Chinese language interface in Hong Kong for facilitating electronic communication conducted in Chinese. We have completed the essential tasks of putting in place the common Chinese language interface that is based on the Unicode standard to ensure compatibility of Chinese information transmitted electronically between computer systems. Such tasks include the development of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, or HKSCS in short, and the submission of the HKSCS to the ISO for incorporation into the ISO 10646 standard. The HKSCS consists of Chinese characters that are unique to the local user community. Currently, about two-thirds of the characters in the HKSCS are already included in the Unicode and ISO 10646 standards. Under the aegis of the ISO, we are actively participating in the on-going development of the ISO 10646 standard. In June this year, we will be hosting the 17th meeting of the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) of the ISO in Hong Kong. The IRG is responsible for dealing with ideographic characters within the ISO 10646 standard.

We have been very grateful for the support rendered by developers of IT products, both local and international, in their incorporation of the HKSCS in their products. In fact, I notice that there are discussion sessions focusing on the HKSCS tomorrow afternoon under the CJK track of this conference. With the support of the HKSCS by developers of IT products, our local users are now able to handle Hong Kong-unique Chinese characters using popular operating systems and office automation products on personal computers, database and application development tools on mid-range computers, Chinese fonts and input devices, etc. We encourage more developers of IT products to provide support of the Unicode standard and the HKSCS. For our local developers, adoption of the Unicode standard may also help pave the way to internationalise their products in the global market.

On top of technical standards, we also draw on global best practices for promoting electronic business and communication. For example, in line with many jurisdictions in other parts of the world that have adopted similar laws, our Electronic Transactions Ordinance is based on the Model Law on Electronic Commerce drafted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Laws. We also make reference to the Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium in our web design guidelines for government bureaux and departments. The purpose is to facilitate access to government web sites by people with disabilities. We believe international efforts such as this conference are highly conducive to advancing the shareability of information, technologies and standards.

I would now like to turn to trust and security that are equally important aspects in the establishment of our e-business infrastructure. Recognizing the need to prevent and combat crimes in the cyberspace, we established an Inter-departmental Working Group on Computer Related Crime last year with the aim of strengthening the framework within which law enforcement against computer-related crime may be carried out. The Working Group has produced its recommendations that have been put to public consultation. Separately, the Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre has been established earlier this year as a focal point in Hong Kong for dealing with information security incidents. Our private sector also plays an important role in enhancing trust among consumers in their transactions on web sites. For example, the Hong Kong Society of Accountants has recently become the first licensee in South East Asia of the WebTrust service that is a quality assurance scheme for e-businesses over the Internet. Under the scheme, a WebTrust seal is issued to the web site of qualified organisations signifying their compliance with the privacy, consumer protection and other requirements of the WebTrust programme.

The availability of ready made, simple to use software to facilitate secure electronic transactions will no doubt help our cause in enhancing information security. We hope that through the collaboration and collective wisdom of participants in the various Unicode initiatives, we shall see progressive enhancements to software in terms of in-built and intuitive security features.

As a cosmopolitan city aspiring to become the hub of e-commerce in this region, Hong Kong is very receptive of new technologies which support our drive towards internationalisation and global connectivity. In this connection, I am very pleased to note that the 18th International Unicode Conference has provided an excellent forum for experts from all over the world to converge and take stock of the latest developments in respect of the Unicode standard and related implementation issues. The adoption of the Unicode standards, which cover a wide range of applications from the standardisation of character codes, date and time, internationalisation of web content, multi-lingual support, XML and natural language search engines to name just a few, will indeed help to enhance our growing e-business infrastructure. This will ultimately bring benefits to both users and developers. I am sure participants will find their time and energy in taking part in this conference highly rewarding. Needless to say Hong Kong stands to gain from your insight and product offerings in due course. On this note I would like to wish you every success in this conference and to our overseas guests, a very pleasant stay in Hong Kong.

Thank you.