The finance ministers of 21 Asia-Pacific economies will gather in Hong Kong from Oct 19-21. In November, presidents and prime ministers will assemble in Shenzhen, a 14-minute train ride away. Between those two dates lies a question that ought to preoccupy anyone who cares about Hong Kong’s future: Will the city be remembered as the venue that hosted a meeting, or as the place that shaped an agenda?
The distinction matters more than it may appear. Hong Kong has hosted magnificent conferences before, and it will host many more. What it has rarely done is use them. For two decades, the city has been an admirable convener and a diffident advocate — happy to supply the ballroom, reluctant to write the menu. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Finance Ministers’ Meeting, which the central government has entrusted to Hong Kong for the first time and which the Ministry of Finance will host here in October, is an invitation to break that habit.
Consider first the sheer scale of what is unfolding around us. This is China’s third turn as APEC host, after Shanghai in 2001 and Beijing in 2014, and it is by far the most dispersed. Roughly 300 meetings and events are being staged across the country under the theme “Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together”, with openness, innovation and cooperation as the year’s three declared priorities. Senior officials met in Guangzhou in February, Shanghai in May, and Dalian in August, the last attracting more than 2,300 delegates. Chengdu hosted the digital and artificial-intelligence ministerial in July; Macao took the tourism ministerial; Guangzhou hosts small and medium-sized enterprises in September. Shenzhen will close the year with the Economic Leaders’ Meeting on Nov 18-19. Hong Kong sits at the financial center of this constellation, and that placement was not accidental.
Nor is it merely symbolic, because the finance track this year carries genuinely consequential business. The 2026 Finance Ministers’ Process rests on four priorities: fiscal policy that supports households at a time of constrained public purses; financing for digital infrastructure, developed in cooperation with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; financial access and opportunity for all; and an inaugural Young Financial Talents Dialogue. Deputies endorsed the work plan in Shanghai in February; senior officials refined it in Chengdu in June. The drafts arriving in Hong Kong in October are not communique boilerplate but the operational content of the Incheon Plan, the five-year framework that will steer regional financial cooperation to 2030. Ministers will leave with documents bearing this city’s name on them.
That is precisely why Hong Kong should be immodest about what it brings to the table. In the first half of this year, the local stock exchange raised HK$209.9 billion ($26.77 billion) across 85 new listings — a 92 percent jump and the strongest first half in five years — ranking second globally behind a Nasdaq Stock Market that was inflated by the largest initial public offering in history. The average daily turnover climbed 18 percent. Some 600 applications sit in the pipeline, and Deloitte expects roughly 160 listings, raising at least HK$300 billion for the full year. Meanwhile, the HKSAR government has issued around HK$250 billion equivalent in green and sustainable bonds, including three tokenized tranches and the world’s first multicurrency digital bond, while Core Climate remains the only voluntary carbon market settling in both Hong Kong dollars and renminbi. These are not talking points for a brochure. They are the raw material of standard-setting.
And standard-setting, rather than mere connection, is where Hong Kong’s ambition should now lie. The city’s habitual self-description as a superconnector is accurate but insufficient, since a connector can always be bypassed whereas an architect cannot. Green finance is the obvious vanguard: Asia’s climate transition will require trillions in capital, and the taxonomies, disclosure rules and verification standards governing that capital are still being written. Digital trade and AI governance form a second frontier, where a common law jurisdiction with independent regulators and free capital movement can test frameworks that neither Washington nor Brussels can credibly impose on the region. Trade facilitation offers a third, more-prosaic but immediately useful contribution — the customs modernization and logistics expertise that developing APEC economies actually want, and which the Dalian talks in August put squarely on the table.
The economic case for that work is already visible in the trade figures. Two-way trade between Northeast China and other APEC economies reached 493 billion yuan ($73.5 billion) in the first seven months of this year, up 8.1 percent; imports and exports through Ningbo ports with APEC partners hit nearly 748 billion yuan, up 9.9 percent. Hong Kong, for its part, brought its free trade agreement with Peru into force on Sept 1, eliminating tariffs on 98.3 percent of Peruvian tariff lines for local exporters and extending the city’s network to nine agreements covering 21 economies. Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East — the direction of travel is unmistakable, and APEC is the forum where it is codified.
Yet ambition of this kind requires machinery, and here the honest assessment is that it is fragmented. Trade promotion, investment attraction, overseas offices, and policy dialogue currently answer to different masters, which is why the city so often speaks in a plural voice abroad. A dedicated office for international economic diplomacy, reporting to the chief executive, would consolidate that footprint and give Hong Kong a single strategic line. New York City folded its United Nations liaison into the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs; Singapore fused trade strategy with foreign policy and won itself the arbitration institutions to prove it. Neither city achieved that by improvisation. The Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau’s steering committee, backed by two new time-limited directorate posts, is the right vehicle for October — but October should leave behind an institution, not just an invoice.
There is, finally, a narrative dividend that no advertising budget could purchase. Hong Kong is described abroad, with tiresome regularity, in terms unrecognizable to the 45 million visitors who came last year and to the ministers who will walk into the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in October. Delegations that see the harbor, the courts, the trading floors and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area beyond will draw their own conclusions, and those conclusions will be more persuasive than any rebuttal we could issue.
The measure of success, then, is not the quality of the catering. It is whether, when the ministers disperse, the region’s financial rulebook reads a little more like Hong Kong’s.
The author is the convenor at China Retold, a member of the Legislative Council, and a member of the Central Committee of the New People’s Party.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
