My second week in Hong Kong has been tumultuous, in the best way possible. The city has turned on all of its festive charm as we approach Christmas, with some of the best decorations I have ever seen. It has been quite cold (by Australian standards anyway, staying between 17 – 20 degrees all week) but very clear which has allowed me to have a good look around the Island and explore more of this amazing region.

View from The Peak, Hong Kong Island's highest mountain

This week at The Lion Rock Institute has been full of work and very enjoyable. After finalizing the current issue of the journal and sending it off to the printers, I have been very busy helping out around the office and working on my article for the next issue of Best Practice, which will be renamed Capitalism.HK under a new editor (Benjamin Marks, current editor-in-chief of Economics.org.au). I have been researching the proposed Competition Law Bill in Hong Kong as well as Australia’s history with our own competition regulation and ACCC, which has been very interesting. The team has also been busy preparing a new website for Capitalism.HK which will help Lion Rock to reach an international audience with its articles and publications on the benefits of the free market.

I have also been given several insightful talks by one of Lion Rock’s co-founders and directors, Andrew Shuen, on the importance of message crafting and the power of effective communication. This has been extremely thought provoking and has taught me a lot about the importance of ‘reaching beyond your base’ and understanding the value sets of the everyday citizen.

Christmas cakes at a local bakery

At the end of the week, I was given the opportunity to listen to a talk from Andrew Work, another co-founder of the Institute that is the current head of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, to a group of MBA students at the beautiful Hong Kong Club Building. The talk was essentially a crash course on Hong Kong’s economic and political history, as well as an update on its current public policy and government workings. The lecture provided me with some fantastic information and insight that you can only learn from a person who has lived here most of his working life, and has given me some great ‘did you know’ facts to take home with me (such as, did you know that 50% of the citizens of Hong Kong live in public housing? For an Australian, that seems almost unimaginable).

Outside of work, I have been able to experience some of Hong Kong’s true Chinese cuisine thanks to Ines who has taken nearly every lunch break as an opportunity to show me what great food the region has to offer. Having lunch like a local is really one of the best ways to learn more about the way of life here, and I must say, I now understand why the Dim Sum here is so popular!

View from The Peak, Hong Kong Island's highest mountain

Christmas celebrations at the Star Ferry Pier

After arriving from a very smooth 7 hour flight from Perth, I found myself in the center of one of the world’s most dynamic and fast-paced economies, Hong Kong.

For a total landmass of only 1,104 square kilometers and a population of over 7 million people, my trip from the airport to my apartment in Sheung Wan was surprisingly efficient – as I soon learnt is the norm here. Everything, from catching the MTR (mass transit railway) to eating lunch is done with absolute precision and no time is wasted, making me realise that a lot of the credit for Hong Kong’s success goes to not only its policy makers, but to the insatiable collective drive of its people.

My first week in the Lion Rock office has been rather busy as myself and the Lion Rock team began to finish editing and finalizing the Institute’s latest issue of Best Practice, a public policy journal for Hong Kong that advocates a strong free-market based approach to policy issues. This issue has writings from 19^thCentury French economist Frederic Bastiat and some more modern day musings from Bill Stacey, chairman of Lion Rock, and Neville Kennard of Kennard’s hire and self-storage, so it makes for quite an interesting read. I have also begun research on an article for Best Practice’s next issue, which will be based on the Competition Law Bill that has been hotly debated for the last several years and has just been accepted by the government. It will be interesting to see the ramifications on the business environment here should it be made into law early next year.

I have also had the chance to see a lot of Hong Kong outside of work thanks to the lovely Ines from Lion Rock who has shown me around both the Island and Kowloon, most notably the infamous shopping malls that seem never ending. I was also able to visit the Peak, the highest mountain on Hong Kong Island, which was breathtaking.

This week I will be working more on the article and liaising with the new editor of the journal to ensure everything is running smoothly for the next issue.