The Chinese idiom “look far ahead with vision” is an appropriate description of what Hong Kong always does. The example at hand is the special administrative region’s move to draft its first five-year plan.
Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu recently confirmed that the SAR government aims to publish the inaugural five-year plan in September, coinciding with the release of the 2026 Policy Address as much as possible, so the public can better understand how the two documents relate to one another and to their daily lives.
Hong Kong has published a Policy Address almost every year since the 1997 handover, and residents are used to reading them as a list of initiatives for the year ahead. What is new is the idea that those initiatives will now sit inside a longer, five-year architecture, and that the government wants both documents read together rather than in isolation. It is a signal that this administration sees governance less as an annual exercise and more as a continuum.
The scale of consultation behind the plan is also noteworthy. Since the public engagement exercise began in June, the government has held more than 100 consultation sessions, drawing about 16,000 submissions relating to the five-year plan and roughly 8,500 more concerning the Policy Address. I noted in an earlier column on the Legislative Council’s preliminary report on aligning Hong Kong with the national 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) that the process was increasingly becoming a broader societal discussion. The latest numbers reinforce that view. A blueprint shaped by tens of thousands of submissions is not simply a plan announced to the public; in a very real sense, it is coauthored by the public.
Yet the real test is not how many people have been consulted. It will be whether the document manages to weave together initiatives Hong Kong has been pursuing somewhat separately into a single, coherent strategic narrative.
Three in particular deserve to be read together rather than as parallel work streams: the Northern Metropolis, the city’s push into artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and its demand-driven talent policy. Each has been advancing on its own track. A five-year plan worth the name should finally make clear how they reinforce one another.
The Northern Metropolis is one of the most consequential undertakings in Hong Kong’s posthandover history, precisely because it is not simply a housing project. Spanning roughly 30,000 hectares, close to a third of Hong Kong’s total land area, and eventually expected to accommodate about 2.5 million residents while generating around 650,000 jobs, it sits directly on the boundary with Shenzhen, placing it at the physical hinge between Hong Kong and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area’s innovation core.
Hong Kong does not lack ambition, ideas or, evidently, public engagement, ... What it has occasionally lacked is the practice to show, in one place, how ambition in land, in technology and in people is meant to add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. If the finalized five-year plan manages that, it will do more than satisfy a consultation process. It will give Hong Kong a single, legible grand story about where the city is going, and why
At a recent district forum, a resident put the housing problem in blunt terms, suggesting that for many young people, getting on the property ladder today depends less on effort than on having wealthy parents. That frustration is real, and it is precisely why the Northern Metropolis cannot be allowed to remain a distant blueprint on a map.
Also, a separate proposal raised at the same forum, calling for the Hong Kong Productivity Council and the city’s trade offices on the Chinese mainland and overseas to help local AI, robotics and embodied-intelligence firms expand internationally, points to what may be the more consequential race of the next five years. Embodied intelligence, the fusion of AI with physical robotics, is rapidly becoming one of the defining battlegrounds of global tech competition, alongside chips and foundation models. Hong Kong is not starting from zero here: The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index 2025 ranked the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster as the world’s largest innovation cluster. But ranking well in an index and building globally competitive companies are two different achievements.
What Hong Kong still needs is a more-systematic mechanism for giving promising AI and robotics ventures the capital, regulatory clarity and overseas market access required to scale. This is precisely the kind of gap a five-year plan, rather than an annual Policy Address, is designed to address. Scaling a tech company rarely happens within a single budget cycle.
Talent is the connective tissue between the two. Lee reiterated recently that the government intends to keep talent admission demand-driven, tailoring categories to what the economy actually needs rather than chasing headline arrival numbers. That discipline matters more than it might sound. Hong Kong’s leap to fourth place globally, and first in Asia, in the IMD World Talent Ranking 2025 was a genuine achievement, but rankings measure a stock of talent at a moment in time; they say nothing about whether that talent is being channeled into the industries the city has decided matter most.
A five-year plan gives Hong Kong the chance to be explicit about this: If the Northern Metropolis needs urban planners, engineers and construction-tech specialists, and the innovation ecosystem needs AI researchers, robotics engineers and applied scientists, then talent policy, education investment and immigration categories should all be visibly pointing in the same direction, rather than being managed by different bureaus on different timetables. I have written before about how education is increasingly embedded in Hong Kong’s development strategy rather than treated as a stand-alone social good; the five-year plan is the natural place to make that embedding explicit and measurable.
There is a broader point underneath all of this; Hong Kong’s greatest long-term asset has never really been any single sector — finance, tourism, logistics or now AI — but its position as a connector, a place where the mainland scale, international capital, and rule-of-law institutions under the “one country, two systems” framework all meet. The Northern Metropolis connects Hong Kong physically to Shenzhen’s innovation base. An AI and robotics acceleration program would connect Hong Kong’s research and financing strengths to the mainland’s manufacturing and deployment scale. A demand-driven talent policy connects global professionals to both. None of these initiatives is new information to anyone following Hong Kong’s development closely. What would be new, and what would genuinely justify calling this a five-year plan rather than a longer Policy Address, is a document that states plainly how the pieces fit together, with sequencing and funding attached, rather than leaving readers to infer the connections themselves.
Hong Kong does not lack ambition, ideas or, evidently, public engagement; more than 100 consultation sessions since June is proof enough of that. What it has occasionally lacked is the practice to show, in one place, how ambition in land, in technology and in people is meant to add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. If the finalized five-year plan manages that, it will do more than satisfy a consultation process. It will give Hong Kong a single, legible grand story about where the city is going, and why.
The author is a fintech adviser, a researcher and a former business analyst for a Hong Kong publicly listed company.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
