Bulletin No. 1, 2011

18   Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2011 W hat have you been doing since 1 July 2010? I have not been too far away from CUHK. I come to campus from time to time, principally to the Institute of Global Economics and Finance to give lectures and supervise research. The institute just completed in January its first ‘Executive Leadership Programme in Global Finance,’ which featured three Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences as lecturers and was very well received. With its capacity gradually built up, and under the leadership of its director, Prof. Liu Pak-wai, the institute will have more and more to offer in terms of economics and finance education and research. Apart from academic activities, I also serve as the chairman of CIC International (Hong Kong) Co., Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Investment Corporation, the sovereign wealth fund of China, with a mandate to invest the nation’s foreign exchange reserves overseas. The Hong Kong subsidiary is just getting started and there is a great deal of work to do. I am also engaged in public service in a number of areas. In Hong Kong, in addition to being a non-official member of the Executive Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, I also serve as a member of the Commission on Strategic Development and the Exchange Fund Advisory Committee. On the mainland, I am a member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a Vice-Chairman of its Sub-Committee on Population, Resources and the Environment. There are still many meetings and much travelling. H ow do you view the development of higher education in Hong Kong? H ong Kong should not be lulled into complacency and smugness by the hype in some of the published university rankings, which are far from reliable. A great deal more needs to be done to maintain the standing of Hong Kong universities vis-à-vis their peers on the mainland, which have been improving rapidly. For example, the leading mainland universities have far more resources to support research and choose their students from the top 0.1 per cent of the entire nation. For a number of reasons, Hong Kong universities have not been able to attract the best local students—the bulk of the children of university-educated Hong Kong parents elect to go to the US or the UK to pursue their tertiary education (and very soon may also be going to the leading universities on the mainland as