Previously, Hong Kong’s success story was built on an elegant proposition: It could be China’s most fluent interlocutor with the West, translating capital, standards and corporate practice across the border. For several decades, that proposition paid off. The city has become the preferred listing venue for Chinese mainland champions, the premier offshore renminbi center, and a legal-and-financial services hub for multinationals doing business with the mainland.
But this role is facing challenges. Some Western countries’ shift from engagement to “de-risking” and partial decoupling with China did not just reduce deal flow; it cast a cloud over the underlying premise that global finance would remain comfortably interoperable. If geopolitical rivalry continues, Hong Kong’s international function could be affected.
Yet the opportunity is back — not because the geopolitical rivalry has eased, but because it has changed character. Recent episodes have landed as warnings far beyond their immediate theaters: The United States’ coercive or aggressive actions directed at Greenland, Venezuela and Iran. Taken together, they reinforce a reality many governments have long understood but avoided stating publicly: The US is capable of abrupt, unilateral moves that treat any country or region — even allies — as instruments. For middle-ranking and smaller powers, the question is no longer whether Washington is indispensable, but what kind of security and economic framework can exist without total dependence on US domestic politics and preferences.
The emerging international order is one of issue-by-issue alignment, where coalitions form and dissolve around energy security, supply chains and tech standards, climate and clean energy, maritime security, or sanctions, as many countries seek resilience through redundancy rather than ideological purity. In that context, the idea of an inevitable Western march toward full-spectrum economic separation from China looks increasingly dated: Even close US allies feel a pull toward selective engagement, with Canada exploring strategic partnerships with China where interests overlap despite security worries, the United Kingdom periodically flirting with reviving a “golden era” in response to growth and finance imperatives, and leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron signaling European openness to Chinese investment in areas like clean energy and advanced manufacturing while insisting on “strategic autonomy”. The underappreciated twist is that some “de-risking from China” is also a quiet hedging against Washington itself — against US political volatility, sudden sanctions and extraterritorial measures, or the risk that security guarantees become transactional — so carefully bounded collaboration with China can, paradoxically, reduce Western states’ exposure to American leverage.
None of this implies a return to naive engagement. Tech controls are tightening, investment screening is normalizing, and security services across advanced economies have become more skeptical. The new international order is not “choose between US and China”. It is “choose your dependencies carefully — and keep options open”.
That is where Hong Kong can reassert its relevance. The city’s value proposition was always that it offered mainland-facing access on terms the West could understand and, crucially, trust: English as the language of business; a deep bench of internationally trained professionals; common law; an independent Judiciary; familiar commercial norms; and an institutional culture designed to reduce transaction risk.
Hong Kong can strengthen its role as a magnet for international talent —researchers, engineers — offering a credible pathway to work on mainland-relevant innovation while living in a global city. Done well, this turns Hong Kong into a two-way gateway: Not only exporting the mainland’s opportunities, but also importing technology, know-how, networks and human capital to serve long-term national developmental interests
But there is an important caveat. Western governments may find it useful to keep channels to the mainland open; they may also be constrained by Washington’s willingness to punish those channels. The threat need not be dramatic. It can be incremental — tariff warnings, limits on market access, restrictions on tech collaboration, or informal pressure on financial institutions. A Canada that signs an ambitious trade arrangement with China might face US retaliation on unrelated issues. For many actors, the problem is not that engagement with the mainland is impossible; it is that it is politically and operationally costly because of Washington’s interference.
That constraint creates space for Hong Kong. It can help companies and governments collaborate with various mainland sectors — such as clean energy, AI and other advanced technologies — by providing deal structuring that meets international compliance expectations, clear contractual frameworks under familiar commercial law, deep financial intermediation from fundraising to project finance and capital markets access, and inviting mainland companies to set up headquarters or offices in Hong Kong, helping cross-border projects move forward without requiring blanket exposure.
Just as important, Hong Kong can serve national development by importing the West’s capabilities: attract leading foreign companies to establish regional headquarters, R&D centers, and bringing with them in-house experts who embed global best practice in product development, corporate governance, cybersecurity, and commercialization — especially in frontier areas such as semiconductors, design services, enterprise software, biotech, green finance, and AI applications. Because Hong Kong operates in English with familiar corporate and legal norms, it can be a lower-friction landing pad for foreign capital that is cautious about direct mainland exposure but still seeks China-linked growth; that capital can then be channeled into compliant, well-structured projects across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and beyond.
In parallel, Hong Kong can strengthen its role as a magnet for international talent —researchers, engineers — offering a credible pathway to work on mainland-relevant innovation while living in a global city. Done well, this turns Hong Kong into a two-way gateway: Not only exporting the mainland’s opportunities, but also importing technology, know-how, networks and human capital to serve long-term national developmental interests.
However, Hong Kong cannot rely too heavily on the West, because Western engagement will remain episodic and contested. Resilience requires broadening the connector model.
The more durable opportunity is for Hong Kong to become the mainland’s bridge to not only the Atlantic world but also the parts of the world that are quickly becoming more important: Belt and Road Initiative partners, the Middle East, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the wider Global South. These are the jurisdictions most likely to pursue the redundancy strategy and to avoid being locked into the US’ ideological framework.
Hong Kong is well-placed to serve this “multi-alignment” era. It understands Western legal-financial expectations while operating inside China’s commercial ecosystem. It has the professional services stack — law, accounting, banking, arbitration, and insurance — that emerging-market partners often need when doing large, complex cross-border transactions. And it has an incentive structure aligned with the mainland’s outward economic strategy.
The irony is that the very forces that dented Hong Kong’s old model are now creating conditions for its renewal. As US unpredictability pushes allies and partners to diversify, the space for selective engagement with Beijing reopens. But that engagement will be conducted with gloves on — structured, conditional, and hedged. Hong Kong’s task is to be the place where those gloves are stitched: Where the mainland can meet the Western world on terms the West can work with, and where the West can meet the mainland without placing all its eggs in a single basket.
If Hong Kong can do that — not by waiting for the West to “return”, but by making itself indispensable to a wider set of partners — it can become more risk-proof, more rounded, and once again central to the way globalization actually works.
The author is a consultant at the Global Hong Kong Institute.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
