The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government is undertaking a highly ambitious plan to develop what is known as the Northern Metropolis University Town. This area, situated in the New Territories near the border of the Chinese mainland, is set to be expanded to create three new university-centered towns — San Tin, Hung Shui Kiu and Ta Kwu Ling. Each town will incorporate a campus and have its own subject areas of specialization, spanning science, technology, medicine, artificial intelligence, robotics, the arts, and more.
Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu has set out five goals for each town: education, technology, talent, industries and urban development. The city, in line with the first five-year plan, aims to build an international hub for high-caliber talent, in order to consolidate Hong Kong’s position as an international center of education, while seeking to actively promote the integration of industry and education.
Why has the university town project become so important? First, it represents a recalibration of Hong Kong’s development strategies amid a changing geopolitical landscape. While Hong Kong has always been a center of world-class education, boasting some of Asia’s and the globe’s top institutions, the city’s leadership has concluded that the sector should not exist in isolation. Rather, education itself is increasingly essential to an emerging international climate that has spurred competition between economies over critical technologies, including AI, semiconductors and robotics.
The world is currently undergoing another revolution. Whether people like it or not, the “AI revolution” is akin to the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, as it will fundamentally change the way humanity exists and its socioeconomic organization. As a result, intense geopolitical competition is emerging. Specifically, the development and supply of semiconductors has become a dynamic of the global technological race. China, as well as many of the country’s leading technological companies, are investing heavily to make breakthroughs on this technological front. Thus, China is embarking on a whole-country effort to develop the necessary technology. However, without robust education, none of this could take place. This is where Hong Kong, as a special administrative region of the nation, assumes an important role, because the city’s unique international integration, combined with its record of academic excellence and world-class education institutions, offer profound advantages.
Thus, the Northern Metropolis University Town development has become a political priority. This is why it is strategically located in the New Territories, close to Shenzhen, dubbed the “technological capital” of China. Favorable geography allows the SAR to orientate its educational resources toward personnel, researchers, companies, and students in the Chinese mainland, while also utilizing the city’s openness to improve connectivity toward the mainland as a whole. This also contributes to the broader goal of developing the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which advocates deeper integration across the entire metropolitan span of the bay area.
This is not just about confronting geopolitics. The economic benefits and implications for Hong Kong’s economic development and international status are huge. In business terms, for those in university institutions, in the city’s real estate markets, and for the academic job market, the university town vision represents an extremely profitable, low-risk investment that will turbocharge the city’s economy. Economic development is much more complex than simply “making more money than last year”. Rather, it requires the constant adaptation and reinvention of the game plan according to changing conditions.
Ultimately, what worked in the past may not always work in the present. Hong Kong is a global financial center with world-class infrastructure. However, when the global economy is increasingly defined by AI and emerging technologies, the city has to respond, and part of that is doing what China does best: imagining grand-scale infrastructure projects that ultimately reshape the fundamentals of economic reality. Hong Kong will continue to occupy a prime position in global finance, but it is increasingly how it performs in education, research and technology that will shape the city’s development in the decades to come.
The author is a British political and international relations analyst.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
