Contrary to popular beliefs, India is not only known for the spicy curry cuisine, it is also well known for design - software design. Some of the best software developers are located in India. This is an advantage over China which has the strength in hardware manufacturing. India also has another advantage over China - English (even though with accents), this definitely helps in grabbing global business opportunities.
Despite the fact that India is well known for her software design talents, she is not taking a back seat in the hardware design arena. There is a substantial percentage of people in India doing lower density IC design works and a smaller percentage of people working on higher density designs.
As a long term strategy, China must not only concentrate her effort on hardware manufacturing but also on design, both hardware and software. Although China has software design talents, she still lacks the management skills for software development projects.
Other asian countries such as South Korea is also a strong contender in the IT industry.
Hong Kong has put too much emphasis on tourism, real estate and the stock markets. Naturally, most put their personal wealth before what is good for Hong Kong. Most would take it for granted that Hong Kong has a distinct, previleged position within China. I wish I could share the same amount of optimism as others. Once Hong Kong's usefulness is expired, the central Chinese government would pay less attention to what Hong-Kongians want, nevermind if they would even consider full-filling some of the Hong Kongians' wishes. Hong Kong lacks high tech advancements and innovations. The education system discourages creativities and promotes the creation of robots - creating generations of pure workers but not thinkers, or people with common sense. Unfortunately, getting high scores at school does not automatically translate into success stories in the real work force. The survival of Hong Kong depends on the economy and economy is not just about real estate, or tourism, but it is greatly dependent on innovative technologies which are not currently encouraged by the HK government or the mindsets of most Hong-Kongians, these include the mindsets of most Hong Kong parents.
There is also a trend for Hong Kong students graduating from universites from Britain, North America, etc to stay abroad rather than returning to Hong Kong , knowing that they would be working much longer hours but getting compensated much less than those doing less innovative works, or those CEOs with much less gray matters in their brains. Hong Kong will soon be brain-drained of innovators and pioneers, not that there is a large number of those to start off with anyway.
