Media

HKU weekly notice (from Jun 29, to Jul 6, 2012)

29 Jun 2012

 

The University Museum and Art Gallery "Appreciating Art in the Spring Hall" public talk series: last talk on Hong Kong Museums
The last talk in the "Appreciating Art in the Spring Hall" series entitled Hong Kong Museums by Mr. Yeung Chun-tong, Director of the University Museum and Art Gallery, HKU will be held tomorrow (June 30, Saturday). This will also be the last talk held in the museum by Mr Yeung before his retirement end of this month after serving the HKU and the museum for more than thirty years.

Media representatives are cordially invited to the talk, details as follows:

Hong Kong Museums
Date: June 30, 2012 (Saturday)
Time: 3pm to 5pm
Venue: 1/F, Fung Ping Shan Building, HKU
Language: Cantonese

For more details, please visit: http://www.hkumag.hku.hk/mc/lectures_events1_01.html

For enquiries, please call the museum at tel: 2241 5500. For media enquiries, please contact Ms Trinni Choy (Assistant Director (Media), Communications and Public Affairs Office) tel: 2859 2606 email: pychoy@hku.hk ; or Ms Melanie Wan (Manager (Media), Communications and Public Affairs Office) tel: 2859 2600 email: melwkwan@hku.hk.

"The Fall of Doha and the Rise of Trans-Pacific Partnership" by Professor Jagdish N. Bhagwati
After 10 years of negotiations, the Doha Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) has been virtually abandoned. While Robert Zoellick (USTR) and Pascal Lamy (EU Trade Commissioner) did not hesitate to point the finger unjustifiably at the G-22 group of developing countries when Doha negotiations failed at Cancun in 2003, there has been reluctance to point the finger at the culprit, the United States whose intransigent demand killed Doha: you do not bark at a Rottweiler!

The near-death of Doha is not the only damage that the United States has done to the world trading system and the WTO – the nature of that damage will be discussed in the Lecture – but the United States has compounded the damage by backing instead the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This discriminatory Preferential Trade Agreement, by building into itself numerous (some still secretive) US-lobbies-fed demands for all kinds of extraneous trade-unrelated demands, has made it impossible for Asian countries like India and China to join the TPP, thus threatening to divide Asia into two blocs, just as a similar policy in South America has already divided that Continent into the proposed Brazil-led FTAA bloc and the Andean Group bloc built along the alternative lines of NAFTA.

Professor Jagdish Bhagwati is a University Professor at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been Economic Policy Adviser to Arthur Dunkel, Director General of GATT (1991-93), Special Adviser to the UN on Globalization, and External Adviser to the WTO. He has served on the Expert Group appointed by the Director General of the WTO on the Future of the WTO and the Advisory Committee to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the NEPAD process in Africa, and was also a member of the Eminent Persons Group under the chairmanship of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso on the future of UNCTAD.

Date: 4 July 2012 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:45pm to 7pm
Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre
Language: English

For registration, please contact Hazel Sze by email at hsze@hku.hk. For media enquiries, please contact Ms Helen Wong at hgewong@hku.hk, or tel: 22194311.

HKU weekly notice is sent to its subscribers on Friday afternoons. If you want to receive the event highlights, please regieter with Ms Helen Ho by email at hmsho@hku.hk.