Leonard Chan says the plan should be judged by whether it changes the city’s institutional reflex

Hong Kong’s first five-year plan deserves attention. It is not simply another catalogue of initiatives. It provides the medium-term framework for the city’s annual Policy Address, budgets and implementation reviews, aligning the special administrative region more closely with national development while offering a clearer horizon for investors, businesses and residents. The novelty, therefore, lies not only in what Hong Kong plans to do, but in whether it can make its separate strengths work as one competitive system.

The test is straightforward. Can research produce products and services that customers will pay for? Can education produce people whom growing industries will want to retain? Can a visitor experience Hong Kong not merely as a place to pass through, but as a city whose culture, services and innovation invite a return? And can every annual initiative be judged by outcomes rather than announcements?

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The plan’s treatment of innovation and technology is ambitious because it is structural. Hong Kong is pursuing a north-central-south layout of innovation parks, five key research and development institutions, the Northern Metropolis, artificial intelligence application, new industrialization and stronger research commercialization. That matters because the city’s future is not secured by training one more foundation model or opening one more incubator. It is secured by shortening the journey from a laboratory result to a pilot, a first customer, a recognized standard and, ultimately, an exportable solution.

The proposed Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Application Scenario Promotion Centre points in the right direction. Matching the needs of public and private users with technology solutions can give local firms what many of them lack: a credible first deployment and evidence that their products work beyond a slide deck. Government should be an exacting first customer, not a permanent captive customer. Every public pilot should have a defined problem, measurable service or productivity gains, safeguards for data and users, and a clear decision on whether the solution is ready to scale, improve or stop.

Infrastructure must be judged in the same way. Construction has begun on the Sandy Ridge Data Facility Cluster, which is expected to reach 180,000 PFLOPS (peta-floating point operations per second) by 2032 — 36 times Hong Kong’s current computing power. This is a potentially important foundation for an intelligent-computing industry, but it is not an economic result today. Computing power is like electricity: indispensable, but valuable only when it helps enterprises, researchers and public services do more with it. The policy commitment to assess demand under the principles of high-efficiency computing, stable power supply and low-carbon transition is therefore as important as the headline capacity figure.

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The same discipline should guide the integration of talent and education. Recruitment matters, but recruitment alone is a revolving door. Hong Kong’s aim should be a full pathway: attract capable people, equip local students and workers, connect them to research and real projects, provide career progression, and give them compelling reasons to build their lives here and across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The Northern Metropolis can become the physical expression of that idea. Its three planned university towns are not conceived as campuses in isolation; they combine education, technology, industry, talent and living environments. The Policy Address also proposes to increase publicly funded research postgraduate places from 7,200 to 9,600 by 2030-31, raise the annual PhD Fellowship quota from 400 to 550 by 2029-30, and strengthen knowledge transfer funding. These are meaningful inputs. Their eventual success, however, should be measured in research translation, quality placements, retained talent, new firms and cross-boundary projects — not simply in student numbers, square meters or graduation ceremonies.

This is where AI education needs particular care. Hong Kong should cultivate more than prompt writers. Students and employees need the judgement to verify an answer, understand a sectoral problem, protect data, recognize when a human must remain in the loop and turn an AI output into accountable work. The city’s multilingual and international environment gives it an advantage in developing this blend of technical competence, professional ethics and cross-cultural literacy. In an AI economy, such capabilities will be more durable than the ability to use any single tool.

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Tourism belongs in this system too. It is often treated as a separate consumption policy, while innovation and talent are treated as production policies. That separation is artificial. Tourism is one of Hong Kong’s most powerful global interfaces. Conferences, cultural events, sport, heritage, food, waterfront experiences and smart visitor services shape how investors, students, researchers and entrepreneurs first encounter the city. The Policy Address’ emphasis on culture-sports-tourism integration, new tourism products and AI-personalized visitor recommendations can improve that encounter.

But success should not be reduced to arrival numbers. The five-year plan projects tourism value added to rise from HK$86.2 billion ($10.98 billion) in 2024 to HK$126 billion in 2030. Reaching that aspiration requires higher-value experiences, better connectivity, professional services, sensible capacity management and reasons to stay longer or return. It also means treating tourism as a living showroom for Hong Kong’s creative industries, digital services and hospitality standards. A well-designed visitor journey can be a form of economic diplomacy.

The unifying opportunity is the Northern Metropolis, where education, technology, industry, talent and urban development are intended to converge. Its success will depend on whether Hong Kong and neighboring cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area move beyond memoranda of understanding toward shared research programs, reciprocal talent flows, common testing arrangements and projects with customers on both sides of the boundary. Hong Kong’s role is not to imitate Shenzhen’s manufacturing scale. It is to add what it does best: international finance, common-law confidence, professional services, global connectivity and trusted market access.

For that reason, the five-year plan needs a scorecard that crosses departmental boundaries. Innovation should be tracked from research to pilot, procurement, investment and revenue. Talent should be tracked from education and skills to employment, retention and mobility. Tourism should be tracked from product and accessibility to visitor spending, satisfaction and carrying capacity. The distinction between an announced policy, a facility under construction, a pilot in progress and a proven outcome must remain visible.

The five-year plan should not be judged by the number of programs it contains. It should be judged by whether it changes the city’s institutional reflex: Whether annual decisions align land, capital, data, education, talent and regulation around real outcomes. Hong Kong’s enduring advantage is not a single campus, model or attraction. It is the ability, under the “one country, two systems” framework, to turn national opportunity, international confidence and local capability into results that are commercially viable, socially useful and globally credible.

The author is founding chairman of the Hong Kong Innovative Technology Development Association.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.