HONG KONG – Hong Kong has an unprecedented role to play in the nation’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), and authorities across the border should grasp the opportunity by improving the coordination and implementation work, experts told a forum on Tuesday.
The seminar, titled “Strategic Planning of the 14th Five Year Plan and the opportunities for Hong Kong,” was organized by the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies, the Hong Kong Coalition and the One Country Two Systems Research Institute on Tuesday.
Charles Li Xiaojia, former chief executive of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, said that Hong Kong has two core competencies – finance and technology – that are highly significant, especially as they apply to the 14th Five-Year Plan.
Charles Li Xiaojia, former chief executive of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, said that Hong Kong has two core competencies – finance and technology – that are highly significant, especially as they apply to the 14th Five-Year Plan
“In finance, Hong Kong’s contribution lies in its providing financing to the nation’s development based on its common law legal system,” Li said. “Most of the successful global financing centers like the United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong adopt a common law legal system. Finance is better suited to common law rather than continental law.”
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“The city’s finance system has a vast advantage, in that it is connected to the international system,” Li said. “It is the lifeline of the HK financial system. No matter what kind of connection you want to have with mainland financial system, you have to go through the Hong Kong financial system first.”
Li said that Hong Kong is a small city, so it cannot become a leading force in the grand scheme of things in terms of state economic planning. But in terms of the country’s standing in global development, Hong Kong has a lot of influences that can be converted. In other words, quantitively Hong Kong’s influence is small, but qualitatively its influence is large.
For science and technology development, Hong Kong needs an ecosystem that contains soil, environment, supply chain, value chain, and also further domestic and international integration.
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“Hong Kong should also have the planning so that we can have a more balanced ecosystem to compete,” said Lionel Ni, provost of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and chair professor at HKUST’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “The city is not short of good planning, but the implementation power under the government is not up to date. We should simplify the administrative process by finding the balancing point.”
Ni added: “We hope that the nation will provide more spaces for Hong Kong universities to open branches on the Chinese mainland, because we enjoy a competitive advantage. We also hope our expertise can be brought into the Chinese mainland in nurturing talents, and so we are looking for closer collaboration. We need to nurture top engineering in chip design and other designing and support to retain these talents in the city.”
James Wang, research director at Bay Area Hong Kong Centre, said that the country’s latest five-year plan is very relevant to Hong Kong’s economic development in the future, and the long-term objective of this plan is consistent with the global trend.
The country has set goals to gradually reduce carbon emission, but currently there are about 70 million people living in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and the population may increase by another 10-20 million in the next 20 years. The larger population will make it even harder to achieve the carbon emission reduction goal, Wang said.
“On the one hand, we have to reduce carbon emissions, and on the other hand, we have to increase our competitiveness and our productivity. That's a very difficult mission,” he said.
He pointed out that currently, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are all building a third runway for their airports, respectively, which means there will be more planes to come in the future.
With all those planes flying around above the Bay Area, there is bound to be more air pollution, Wang said. And airspace is also limited in the area, more planes will definitely lead to air congestion, and it will become a “bottleneck” issue for the economic development for the region, Wang added.
Wang also said that “we are building the third runway too late, as nobody foresaw that e-commerce got a huge boost against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, and e-commerce generates large demand for air transport.”
In trade and logistics, Raymond Yip, former deputy executive director of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, said Hong Kong should use the Bay Area as an entry point to introduce premium products and services from abroad to the Chinese mainland, and to participate more in the nation’s internal circulation development, including production, allocation, delivery and other services.
“Hong Kong can play a role as the connector of the internal circulation and the international circulation, connecting the two circulations,” Yip said. “In the past few decades, Hong Kong has accumulated rich experience in this regard.”
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