Letter from the President: To the OHKF Family
Letter from the President: To the OHKF Family
Dear Members of the OHKF Family
How to promote Chinese culture?
Five thousand years of Chinese culture, if quantified, is like the infinite universe. How to promoting such a boundless treasure? Total dedication would be an understatement. For OHKF, this is exactly our calling, as Chinese culture promotion is one of our core missions. Our resources and resourcefulness pale into insignificance in the face of such a mammoth task. So how do we go about doing it? This is what I want to share with you as I pen this letter in the middle of the night. I also look forward to your valuable feedback.
When I became OHKF President in January last year, our three core missions were public policy research and advocacy, Chinese culture promotion, and the Hong Kong Chronicles compilation. Policy research and chronicles compilation have well defined scopes, clear deliverables, and established mode of operations. For these two missions, our main strategic consideration was “How to do it well”. In comparison, Chinese culture promotion is so vast and infinite that in addition to the "how” question, a more fundamental question was: "What should we do?".
After reviewing the strengths and challenges of our Academy of Chinese Studies (ACS) and upon discussion with ACS Executive Director Dr Yau Yat and his Deputy Mr Joel Poon, I decided on a dual-focus strategy: positioning ourselves as a "treasure trove of Chinese culture" that creates and promotes cultural contents; and also positioning ourselves as the partner of choice in providing and promoting national education.
This strategy aligns neatly with the National 14th Five-Year Plan's strategic positioning of Hong Kong as a centre for cultural exchanges. Compared with all other leading Chinese cities, Hong Kong has the richest international culture. Compared with our international peers such as New York, Paris, London and Tokyo, Hong Kong has the richest Chinese culture. These two distinct strengths together made Hong Kong unique in the world as a centre for cultural exchange between the East and the world. As Hong Kong’s leading think tank, OHKF certainly needs to do our utmost in this calling.
Treasure Trove of Chinese Cultural Content
Over the last few years, OHKF has created a huge amount of Chinese cultural contents, from the glory of the traditional to the magnificence of the contemporary. We partnered with TVB to launch a mini-series on “China Today” that became the talk of the town, with its 400 episodes attracting an average of 1.2 million viewers per episode. The TV series were also made available for schools, universities and government departments for broadcast on their in-house platforms.
Building on the success of the TV mini-series, our Chinese culture flagship platform – Our China Story – has partnered with RTHK to launch 21 episodes of one-hour radio series this year. We also supplemented it with a further 42 episodes that were broadcast on our website and digital platforms. Another partner is HOY TV, with whom we jointly launched a 10-episode TV series featuring 10 trailblazers in science and technology in Hong Kong. It attracted a total audience of over 520,000.
To further our mission, we have revamped the Foundation's website to make its contents and browsing features more internationally friendly, so that our international audiences can have a more delightful experience surfing our rich contents. At the same time, the English and Simplified Chinese versions of OCS website have also been launched this year. More than 4,200 articles have been turned into simplified Chinese and about 200 articles have been rendered into English. After going live for only two months, these two new platforms have already recorded more than 30,000 viewership.
The “Our China Story” website has been listed by Google under the “News” category, given that the contents are original, authentic, credible, and professional. We also make good use of other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to extend our reach, attracting about half a million followers.
The original cultural contents we produced in terms of TV and radio programme plus books and essays and teaching material are gemstones. To more effectively promote cultural exchanges, we work hard to render all these contents into English so that they are more accessible, understandable, and credible to the international community.
Content is king and distribution is queen. This is why we are working hard to extend the distribution network for these contents to reach the broader international community. We are making encouraging headways and I look forward to sharing with you some good news when I write to you next time.
Partner of Choice for National Education
We have benefited from the support of many like-minded government agencies, schools, and business enterprises in promoting Chinese culture and national education. They seek partnership with us because we have earned their recognition and trust. We have become the partner of choice for various organisations in providing and promoting national education.
Our partnership with the Palace Museum in Beijing has won us two firsts. We are the Museum’s first Hong Kong partner in using the Museum’s resources to produce innovative teaching materials for 400 schools in Hong Kong. Another “first” is that the teaching materials we thus produced for Hong Kong schools were then re-exported to the Museum for use as learning material by schools in the Mainland.
We are also the Civil Service College’s partner in providing national education programme for civil servants. In 2023, our in-depth and innovative national education training programme has been attended by 6,000 civil servants and others, including directorate-grade civil servants.
We are also a partner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in organising national security seminars for 1,200 senior and middle-ranking ICAC officers. Additionally we have been invited by the Hong Kong Tourism Board to organise a seminar on "Understanding National Policies and Hong Kong's Role" for 70-plus senior middle-ranking staff members. When the Correctional Services Department organises national education for inmates, we again become their partner.
Schools are the primary recipients of national education and so we are the leading partners of Education Bureau and the Quality Education Fund in promoting civic education and national education. Every year, we hold cultural talks for 8,000 teachers and students in primary and secondary schools. ACS’s online reading programme and cultural studies platforms are the most visited websites for culture and education in Hong Kong, with an average of 1.4 million monthly page views. ACS website’s total viewership rate amounts to 30 million a year. We also collaborate with the Education Bureau to produce a large number of curriculum materials for use in schools and organise territory-wide culture and history knowledge contest.
At OHKF, Chinese culture promotion is undertaken not just by ACS but is a common mission of the entire Foundation. The Hong Kong Chronicles Institute, for example, has been translating their books into English for distribution to leading libraries across the world in digital form so as to promote the international community's understanding of Hong Kong's history and culture.
In Closing
Hong Kong is a cultural hub where the Chinese and other civilizations blend with one another, cross-fertilising and enriching each other. Hong Kong is an enabler in promoting cultural exchange, and an eyewitness to how such exchanges promotes harmony and mutual respect.
In our efforts to promote Chinese culture and national education, we spare no effort in broadening our engagement and deepening our collaboration with partners. They multiply the reach and impact of our work. Internally, too, all our colleagues regardless of work nature and job description take cultural promotion and national education as part of their core collective responsibility.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank ACS’s two founding fathers: OHKF Honorary Chairman Mr Tung Chee-hwa and ACS Honorary Chairman Mr Charles Lee. Back in 1997 after Mr Tung became HKSAR Chief Executive, he received a lot of feedback from the education community that the promotion of Chinese culture was frustrated by a serious lack of high-quality online cultural resources. Determined to fix it, Mr Tung turned to Mr Charles Lee, who then set up ACS in Year 2000 and served as Chairman until in 2022 when he stepped down as Chairman to become Honorary Chairman. In 2018, ACS became a member organisation of OHKF. What we have delivered in cultural promotion is the result of Mr Tung’s sagacity and Mr Lee’s outstanding leadership. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
Jane Lee
OHKF President
Dear Members of the OHKF Family
How to promote Chinese culture?
Five thousand years of Chinese culture, if quantified, is like the infinite universe. How to promoting such a boundless treasure? Total dedication would be an understatement. For OHKF, this is exactly our calling, as Chinese culture promotion is one of our core missions. Our resources and resourcefulness pale into insignificance in the face of such a mammoth task. So how do we go about doing it? This is what I want to share with you as I pen this letter in the middle of the night. I also look forward to your valuable feedback.
When I became OHKF President in January last year, our three core missions were public policy research and advocacy, Chinese culture promotion, and the Hong Kong Chronicles compilation. Policy research and chronicles compilation have well defined scopes, clear deliverables, and established mode of operations. For these two missions, our main strategic consideration was “How to do it well”. In comparison, Chinese culture promotion is so vast and infinite that in addition to the "how” question, a more fundamental question was: "What should we do?".
After reviewing the strengths and challenges of our Academy of Chinese Studies (ACS) and upon discussion with ACS Executive Director Dr Yau Yat and his Deputy Mr Joel Poon, I decided on a dual-focus strategy: positioning ourselves as a "treasure trove of Chinese culture" that creates and promotes cultural contents; and also positioning ourselves as the partner of choice in providing and promoting national education.
This strategy aligns neatly with the National 14th Five-Year Plan's strategic positioning of Hong Kong as a centre for cultural exchanges. Compared with all other leading Chinese cities, Hong Kong has the richest international culture. Compared with our international peers such as New York, Paris, London and Tokyo, Hong Kong has the richest Chinese culture. These two distinct strengths together made Hong Kong unique in the world as a centre for cultural exchange between the East and the world. As Hong Kong’s leading think tank, OHKF certainly needs to do our utmost in this calling.
Treasure Trove of Chinese Cultural Content
Over the last few years, OHKF has created a huge amount of Chinese cultural contents, from the glory of the traditional to the magnificence of the contemporary. We partnered with TVB to launch a mini-series on “China Today” that became the talk of the town, with its 400 episodes attracting an average of 1.2 million viewers per episode. The TV series were also made available for schools, universities and government departments for broadcast on their in-house platforms.
Building on the success of the TV mini-series, our Chinese culture flagship platform – Our China Story – has partnered with RTHK to launch 21 episodes of one-hour radio series this year. We also supplemented it with a further 42 episodes that were broadcast on our website and digital platforms. Another partner is HOY TV, with whom we jointly launched a 10-episode TV series featuring 10 trailblazers in science and technology in Hong Kong. It attracted a total audience of over 520,000.
To further our mission, we have revamped the Foundation's website to make its contents and browsing features more internationally friendly, so that our international audiences can have a more delightful experience surfing our rich contents. At the same time, the English and Simplified Chinese versions of OCS website have also been launched this year. More than 4,200 articles have been turned into simplified Chinese and about 200 articles have been rendered into English. After going live for only two months, these two new platforms have already recorded more than 30,000 viewership.
The “Our China Story” website has been listed by Google under the “News” category, given that the contents are original, authentic, credible, and professional. We also make good use of other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to extend our reach, attracting about half a million followers.
The original cultural contents we produced in terms of TV and radio programme plus books and essays and teaching material are gemstones. To more effectively promote cultural exchanges, we work hard to render all these contents into English so that they are more accessible, understandable, and credible to the international community.
Content is king and distribution is queen. This is why we are working hard to extend the distribution network for these contents to reach the broader international community. We are making encouraging headways and I look forward to sharing with you some good news when I write to you next time.
Partner of Choice for National Education
We have benefited from the support of many like-minded government agencies, schools, and business enterprises in promoting Chinese culture and national education. They seek partnership with us because we have earned their recognition and trust. We have become the partner of choice for various organisations in providing and promoting national education.
Our partnership with the Palace Museum in Beijing has won us two firsts. We are the Museum’s first Hong Kong partner in using the Museum’s resources to produce innovative teaching materials for 400 schools in Hong Kong. Another “first” is that the teaching materials we thus produced for Hong Kong schools were then re-exported to the Museum for use as learning material by schools in the Mainland.
We are also the Civil Service College’s partner in providing national education programme for civil servants. In 2023, our in-depth and innovative national education training programme has been attended by 6,000 civil servants and others, including directorate-grade civil servants.
We are also a partner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in organising national security seminars for 1,200 senior and middle-ranking ICAC officers. Additionally we have been invited by the Hong Kong Tourism Board to organise a seminar on "Understanding National Policies and Hong Kong's Role" for 70-plus senior middle-ranking staff members. When the Correctional Services Department organises national education for inmates, we again become their partner.
Schools are the primary recipients of national education and so we are the leading partners of Education Bureau and the Quality Education Fund in promoting civic education and national education. Every year, we hold cultural talks for 8,000 teachers and students in primary and secondary schools. ACS’s online reading programme and cultural studies platforms are the most visited websites for culture and education in Hong Kong, with an average of 1.4 million monthly page views. ACS website’s total viewership rate amounts to 30 million a year. We also collaborate with the Education Bureau to produce a large number of curriculum materials for use in schools and organise territory-wide culture and history knowledge contest.
At OHKF, Chinese culture promotion is undertaken not just by ACS but is a common mission of the entire Foundation. The Hong Kong Chronicles Institute, for example, has been translating their books into English for distribution to leading libraries across the world in digital form so as to promote the international community's understanding of Hong Kong's history and culture.
In Closing
Hong Kong is a cultural hub where the Chinese and other civilizations blend with one another, cross-fertilising and enriching each other. Hong Kong is an enabler in promoting cultural exchange, and an eyewitness to how such exchanges promotes harmony and mutual respect.
In our efforts to promote Chinese culture and national education, we spare no effort in broadening our engagement and deepening our collaboration with partners. They multiply the reach and impact of our work. Internally, too, all our colleagues regardless of work nature and job description take cultural promotion and national education as part of their core collective responsibility.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank ACS’s two founding fathers: OHKF Honorary Chairman Mr Tung Chee-hwa and ACS Honorary Chairman Mr Charles Lee. Back in 1997 after Mr Tung became HKSAR Chief Executive, he received a lot of feedback from the education community that the promotion of Chinese culture was frustrated by a serious lack of high-quality online cultural resources. Determined to fix it, Mr Tung turned to Mr Charles Lee, who then set up ACS in Year 2000 and served as Chairman until in 2022 when he stepped down as Chairman to become Honorary Chairman. In 2018, ACS became a member organisation of OHKF. What we have delivered in cultural promotion is the result of Mr Tung’s sagacity and Mr Lee’s outstanding leadership. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
Jane Lee
OHKF President
