HKU POP SITE releases survey findings on the future of Hong Kong and ChinaBack

The Public Opinion Programme (POP) at The University of Hong Kong today releases as scheduled via its website the "HKU POP SITE" (http://hkupop.pori.hk) the result of its surveys on Hong Kong people's trust of the HKSAR and Beijing Central Governments, people's confidence in the future of China, Hong Kong, and "one country, two systems". The date of its next release will be December 27, Thursday, at 2 pm. The result of the 2001 year-ender survey, people's satisfaction with the HKSAR Government, and Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's latest popularity rating, will be released.

About four-and-a-half years after Hong Kong's handover, on December 11, China has formally become a member of the World Trade Organisation. Earlier this month, our neighbouring city Shenzhen held a land auction open to foreign businesses for the first time. These are signs that economic assimilation is occurring at great pace across the border. Long before Hong Kong's handover, POP has been monitoring people's opinion on a variety of national issues. The POP Site's release today is only a small part of a large collection of similar data.

Nevertheless, the findings released today could have very important meaning, especially when people's trust in the central government has surpassed that of the local government - first time ever according to POP's record. People's confidence in Hong Kong has plunged, but their confidence in the mainland has climbed to record high. As a supplementary reference, the POP Site has also released findings on intended property investors' appraisal of the political, economic and social conditions across the border.

Resources permit, the POP Site will gradually enrich its content by providing more data on similar topics. Shall anyone have any question regarding the research design of the surveys published in the POP Site, our team members will be happy to answer them, but we will not comment on the findings at this stage. Such an arrangement would be reviewed when we have more resources. Please note that Dr CHUNG Ting-yiu Robert, Director of Public Opinion Programme, is solely responsible for the works published in the POP Site, which does not represent the stand of the University of Hong Kong.

All regular surveys reported in the POP Site are random telephone surveys conducted by interviewers, targeting at Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong of age 18 or above. The sample size is generally over 1,000 respondents. At 95% confidence level, the sampling error is less than plus/minus 3 percentage points. That means if we were to conduct the same survey 100 times, using the same questions in each survey but with different random samples, we would expect 95 times getting a figure within the error margins specified.