If you ask the average person on the streets of this city about the World Trade Organisation, the answer is likely to be brief. Yet few places depend as much on the WTO as Hong Kong, where trade amounts to three times the gross domestic product, provides nearly half the jobs and is shoring up an otherwise sluggish economy with double-digit growth.
Nearly all Hong Kong's celebrity tycoons owe their wine collections, Bentleys, yachts and other emblems of wealth to the gradual lifting of trade barriers, most recently in China. The family of the chief executive owes its fortune to trade, as does the financial secretary, and many other of the city's rich and famous.
Their success is due to more than the WTO, of course, but since 1963, it has set the stage by orchestrating market-opening agreements among its members, currently numbering 148 and including all the world's major economies except Russia, which is eager to get in.
Hong Kong is the natural poster child for advocates of free trade, with its open port and adaptability, changing over the past three decades from a manufacturing centre to a service hub. The city now shines as a facilitator and manager of trade, rather than a maker of goods, a role which has moved north.
So, it is all the more strange that the staging of the next WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, from December 13 to 18, should inspire more dread than exultation.
The most senior official to comment on the event in recent months has been Dick Lee Ming-kwai, the police commissioner.
Anti-WTO activists, meeting this weekend at City University to plan for the December meeting, have already attracted more media attention than the government, whose $750 million budget will be spent largely on making sure the protesters are kept sufficiently distant from the hotels and the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, where thousands of officials will congregate.
