How is Hong Kong meeting the challenge of merging with China while retaining its economic identity? That and other questions regarding the current and future status of Hong Kong will be examined in a two-day conference being sponsored by the Hong Kong Club, an undergraduate organization at Yale.
Titled "One Country, Two Systems," the conference will take place Friday-Saturday, Nov. 7-8, in the auditorium of Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave. All sessions are free and open to the public.
The event, subtitled "The Hong Kong Conference at Yale," is also sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies, the Law School, the Asia Law Forum and the Yale-China Association. Participants will come from all over the United States and China.
The conference will open on Friday at 1 p.m. with remarks on Hong Kong's history by Jonathan Spence, the Sterling Professor of History. The event will feature the following four panels:
* Friday, 1:30 p.m., "Law in Post-handover Hong Kong --Constitutional and Political Implications," featuring Owen Fiss, Sterling Professor of Law; and Margaret Ng, barrister, journalist, author and former member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council and Bar Council.
* Friday, 3:30 p.m., "The Role of the Media -- Public Information and Civic Society," featuring Robert Chung, senator, the Uni
versity of Hong Kong and member of the Television Programme Advisory Panel for Radio Television Hong Kong; and Ying Chan, a fellow of the Media Studies Center -- a program of the Freedom Forum -- where she is researching libel and free press issues in East Asia.
* Saturday, 10:30 a.m., "Perspectives in Politics -- Local, National and Global," featuring Pamela Crossley, professor of history, Dartmouth College; Allen Lee, chair of the Liberal Party of Hong Kong and member of the Provisional Legislative Council; and Tsang Yok Sing, chair of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong and member of the Provisional Legislative Council.
* Saturday, 2 p.m., "Hong Kong's Economic Challenges -- Home and Abroad," featuring
Margaret Fong, deputy director-general of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Washington, D.C.; Professor Mark Mason of the School of Management; and Richard Wong, director of the School of Business at the University of Hong Kong, director of the Hong Kong Center for Economic Research and member of the Hong Kong government's Economic Advisory Committee.
Gustav Ranis, the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics and director of Yale Center for International and Area Studies, will offer closing remarks at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.
For further information, contact Rose Choy at 436-1398 or by e-mail at rose.choy@yale.edu; Janet Pau at 436-3337 or janet.pau
@yale.edu; or Marco Wan at 436-0437 or marco.wan@yale.edu. The conference website is www.yale.edu/hkclub.