The Pulse：The controversy of schools for social development , patent & intellectual property rights

This week we’ve got a heady mixture of murky off-shore dealings, confusion over trademarks and what can only be described as prejudice.
These accusations of prejudice revolve around the relocation to Tuen Mun of a primary school for troubled students. This plan has now been endorsed by legislators but only after an ugly row when a headmaster from a neighbouring school expressed fears over the impact on his students from incoming drug takers, sex addicts and gangsters. He has since apologized but not before some local councilors also used this kind of language to try and prevent the school’s relocation.
This ugly row raises questions, not just over attitudes to students who are different but also over how the government is handling the whole issue of non-mainstream schools.
So what are politely called misunderstandings seem to be rife in the education sector but confusion is also rife among companies doing business in China who have long worried about the protection of their intellectual property – an issue that has also been raised in a rather clumsy fashion here in Hong Kong.
The fallout from the publication of the leaked Panama Papers seems, if anything, to be mounting and going more and more global with an impact both in China and here in Hong Kong. With us in the studio to discuss these issues is David Lee, a business and finance specialist form Hong Kong University and Alex Gardner, the Asia legal and regulatory analyst for Bloomberg