Educators in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region described the 109 major projects in six key areas outlined in the nation’s 15th Five-Year Plan as “crucial anchors” in the city’s talent attraction efforts.
The major projects span critical domains including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing and green technologies. The educators agreed that pinpointing the talent needs of the nation is a priority for the city, now being officially commissioned by the national blueprint as a global high-caliber talent hub.
Andrew Yao Cho-fai, who chairs Lingnan University’s council, said he hopes that Hong Kong’s pursuit of such global talent can help the nation “achieve technological breakthroughs in areas that risk becoming ‘choke points’10 years down the road”.
In an interview with China Daily, Yao — a legislator and Hong Kong deputy to the National People’s Congress — highlighted the city’s world-class universities as a magnet for attracting talent.
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Hong Kong’s universities have highlighted the city’s strong attractions for global talent — among them a simple low tax regime, robust research funding, and international school options for their children’s smooth relocation, Yao said.
In the case of Lingnan University, 43 of its scholars made Stanford University’s World’s Top 2% Scientists list in 2025, some 30 of whom had joined the institution in the past three years, said Yao.
The university is set to recruit 60 outstanding scholars from around the globe by 2027, he added.
Universities across the city have been intensifying their recruitment efforts to woo top global faculty. The year 2025 saw over 1,800 Hong Kong-based scholars recognized on the annual list for their single-year recent research impact — up nearly 300 from earlier and representing a 10 percent year-on-year rise.
Official data shows that the SAR’s moves to attract and retain talent, initiated in late 2022, had brought over 270,000 Chinese mainland and overseas professionals to settle in the city by January, which is expected to bring an annual direct economic contribution of about HK$34 billion ($4.34 billion) — equivalent to 1.2 percent of Hong Kong’s local gross domestic product.
Of those, most are degree holders and roughly a quarter carry foreign passports. They are now working in key industries including finance, trading, and innovation and technology.
Yao said that now is an opportune moment for stakeholders to think bigger and make a greater play on the city’s strengths as a safe, stable destination for work — important considerations for overseas intellectuals when weighing up their choices concerning where to locate amid deepening socio-economic fragmentation elsewhere.
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Lawrence Tang Fei, a lawmaker representing the education sector, said that the formulation of Hong Kong’s first five-year plan provides a key opening for the SAR government to gain clarity from central authorities on which types of professionals are of strategic importance to the national interests, but who — for various reasons — may be precluded from basing themselves on the mainland.
Only with that clarity, Tang said, can Hong Kong deliver on its assigned role as a talent hub under the national blueprint — one that is able to “lock on” to the talent cohorts prioritized by the nation’s broader development strategies and can direct its resources accordingly toward building platforms tailored to their needs.
He explained that at the tertiary level, any such reallocation of resources would likely entail the government leveraging the University Grants Committee to recalibrate official funding formulas, creating incentives for public institutions citywide to pursue the identified talent group in a deliberate, targeted manner.
For enterprises and individual research bodies, Tang proposed launching small-scale but big-sway talent admissions programs that recruit people based on their disciplinary pedigrees, rather than relying on a broad list gleaned from general university rankings.
