Expired: Hong Kong government's ideas about Chinese
medicine are clearly past their sell-by date
For ages, traditional Chinese
medicine has lived in the shadows as alternative medicine. But overnight, with
a Chinese medicine researcher anointed as this year's Nobel co-laureate for
medicine, it has acquired a halo of legitimacy.
In Hong Kong, however, Chinese
medicine seems about to enter the dark ages. Designated as a new pillar
industry, it never got anything except governmental lip service. After six
years of inaction under Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, the government is now set to
impose tough regulations on proprietary Chinese medical products. More than
8,000 Chinese remedies face being taken off the shelves unless they are standard-compliant,
threatening to squeeze the life out of the industry.
Insiders blame the government for
three strategic blunders. First, it asks thousands of Chinese herbal remedies
to meet tough European standards as Western drugs, not health products, forgetting
that ours is too small a market for manufacturers to bear the cost of
compliance.
Our medical bureaucracy is top-heavy
with Western-trained doctors who do not know that multi-herb formulations are
too complex for their active ingredients to be isolated by Western procedures.
As the Chinese Medicine Ordinance
prohibits sales outside licensed premises, traders are also shut out of
e-commerce in this age of the internet. Clearly, Hong Kong doesn't know the
first thing about nurturing industries
To apply US Food and Drug
Administration-style requirements on herbal medicine is to cause its death by
regulatory strangulation. Why not emulate Canada and treat Chinese herbal
medicines as "natural health products"?
Second, the idea of integrating the
Chinese medicine market within Greater China has never occurred to our leaders,
though our tiny market size can't sustain its healthy development. China has
its own regulatory body for Chinese medicinal products. It makes no sense for
Hong Kong to go its own way.
Third, oversight and resource
allocation are in the hands of the Food and Health Bureau, while the Commerce
and Economic Development Bureau is reduced to being a bystander. This has led
to bureaucratic insanities.
China has its own regulatory body
for Chinese medicinal products. Photo: ReutersFor years, the Trade Development
Council has co-organised the annual Chinese medical products exhibition. But
the Food and Health Bureau forbids any display of unregistered proprietary
Chinese medicines. Unable to take samples home, foreign traders leave
empty-handed and deal-starved. As the Chinese Medicine Ordinance prohibits
sales outside licensed premises, traders are also shut out of e-commerce in
this age of the internet. Clearly, Hong Kong doesn't know the first thing about
nurturing industries.
In Macau, by contrast, common sense
prevails. The University of Macau's Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences has
state-of-the-art research facilities, while Hong Kong officials fought Baptist
University tooth and nail over a parcel of land targeted for a Chinese medicine
hospital.
Last week, the University of Macau
signed an agreement with the Guangdong-Macau Traditional Chinese Medicine
Technology Industrial Park Development Company to jointly develop
pharmaceutical products and promote Chinese medicine, with four proposed
centres.
Hundreds of Hong Kong's
manufacturers and traders of traditional Chinese medicine are threatening to
relocate to the Hengqin industrial park, where the promise of integration with
the mainland market beckons.
Will Hong Kong learn from Macau and
not consign the industry to the critical list?
Philip Yeung is consultant to the
vice-rector for academic affairs at the University of Macau. Dr Albert Wong,
from the University of Wisconsin, and founding president of the Modernised
Chinese Medicine International Association, also contributed to this article
