There is a well-known Chinese idiom, often attributed to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) official Lin Zexu, that Hong Kong could well have taken as its motto: Hai na bai chuan, you rong nai da, or “The sea is vast because it welcomes countless rivers”. For over a century, capital, goods, ideas and people from every direction have flowed into Hong Kong, and the city has grown larger, richer and more resilient. On Tuesday, a different kind of “river” will arrive at the city: Finance ministers and other senior officials from across the Asia-Pacific gather for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Finance Ministerial Meeting 2026, the first time this meeting will be held in Hong Kong.
Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po wrote in his weekly blog recently that hosting the meeting shows the central government’s strong support for Hong Kong and reflects the city’s standing as an important international financial center. It is also a vote of confidence in a city that, for the past two years, has been erroneously told by some that its best days were behind it.
Hong Kong has been an APEC member since 1991. Last October, Chan was a guest at the finance ministerial meeting in Incheon, South Korea, where he urged members to safeguard a rules-based multilateral trading system and promised global investors a stable, consistent and predictable business environment. A year later, Hong Kong is hosting the meeting. That is quite a journey.
The numbers explain why this matters — 87 percent of Hong Kong’s total external trade is with APEC economies, so the Asia-Pacific is not a distant policy abstraction for the city but its most active market. There is also a pleasing coincidence of timing, since the meeting opens just over a week after the redeveloped Huanggang Port began operations, a facility designed to handle 200,000 passenger trips a day, with capacity potentially rising to around 300,000. Factor in the international airport, and visiting delegates will be confronted with a city that is not only talking about connectivity but building it.
But what does it mean for Hong Kong’s standing as a global financial center? It is more than a ceremonial honor. A financial center is, at bottom, a network of trust. The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) provides one measure of that standing. In its 40th edition, published in September, Hong Kong retained third place globally and first place in the Asia-Pacific region. It assesses cities on human capital, business environment, financial-sector development, infrastructure and reputation. The first four are more readily quantified. Reputation is harder to earn and impossible to buy, and it is built at moments like this, when ministers and other high-ranking officials from 21 economies work in the same rooms, hear the same briefings and spend two days experiencing how the city functions. A positive experience can leave a lasting impression on officials who influence investment and economic policy across the region. No ranking can fully capture that.
The timing matters for another reason: The world has become a more fragmented place. Trade tensions, competing tech standards and geopolitical rivalry are pushing many economies to ask where they can still do business under predictable rules. Hong Kong’s answer rests on solid ground: an open capital market, a solid common-law system, the leading offshore renminbi hub, and strong backing from the Chinese mainland. Hosting the APEC finance chiefs here, followed weeks later by the economic leaders in Shenzhen, tells the story of two complementary cities in one region: Shenzhen as an engine of innovation and manufacturing; Hong Kong as the platform that links it with global capital. That is what superconnector means in practice.
Of the four priorities Chan highlighted, the first two go together. One is fiscal policy that supports livelihoods, meaning how governments can protect families and stabilize the economy while raising productivity. The 2026 Policy Address and the city’s first five-year plan seek to do exactly that, pairing support for families with long-term investment in new engines of growth. The other is financing for digital infrastructure: Chan pointed out that artificial intelligence is driving huge investment in computing power, data centers and cloud services, and that Hong Kong can connect governments, financial institutions, investors and tech firms, and explore public-private partnership models.
The other two priorities are about people and reach. Inclusive finance speaks to the small and medium-sized enterprises that form the backbone of the local business community. For all the attention given to initial public offerings and mega-deals, a financial center earns its status by also serving the small exporters and the family firms, and Hong Kong topped the fintech ranking of the GFCI, which gives it both the tools and the duty to widen access to finance. Cooperation among young financial talent looks further ahead. The Policy Address plans for three university towns in the Northern Metropolis, and the five-year plan envisages a hub for high-caliber talent beside the city’s established centers. Indeed, the mix of finance, innovation, talent and connectivity is what makes the Hong Kong model distinctive.
Beyond the four priorities, Chan said Hong Kong will also show its strength in two fields that deserve more attention. One is green finance: green and sustainable debt issued in Hong Kong exceeded $76 billion in 2025, and about $38 billion in international green and sustainable bonds were arranged in Hong Kong, making the city Asia’s leading market in this category for the eighth consecutive year. The other is insurance and risk management, where Hong Kong offers insurance-linked securities, captive insurers, specialized marine risk pools and catastrophe bonds. As climate risks multiply across the region, these are not niche products. They are a different kind of infrastructure, and the Asia-Pacific will need a lot of it.
All of this fits a pattern. The latest GFCI kept Hong Kong third, while the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster remained the world’s leading innovation cluster in the Global Innovation Index 2026. IPO fundraising has surged 153 percent in the first eight months of the year. None of this fits the doomsayers’ script for the city. Rankings record what has already been achieved, but events like this week’s meeting help create what comes next, because they bring the decision-makers of the region to the city and let them see the credentials for themselves.
The APEC Finance Ministerial Meeting reinforces Hong Kong’s role as an international financial center by adding trust and reputation to the numbers, and it ties together the threads running through so much of what is happening here: the five-year plan, the Policy Address, the Northern Metropolis, the airport expansion, the new Huanggang Port, and the push into AI and green finance. Each says the same thing from a different angle: Hong Kong does not close doors — it opens them. The sea does not become vast by keeping rivers out. Hong Kong has always known that, and the Asia-Pacific will see it for itself.
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.
