For decades, the map of global higher education was drawn in familiar ink. Boston and Cambridge, Oxford and Palo Alto — these were the names students whispered with ambition, and the places where the world’s knowledge was minted. That map is being redrawn now, and anyone who still believes the old coordinates are permanent has not been paying attention. The center of gravity in research and learning is shifting eastward, and Hong Kong sits precisely where the fault lines meet.
That was the unmistakable message delivered last week at the Asia Universities Summit 2026, where more than 600 university chiefs, policymakers, and academic and industry leaders from Asia and worldwide gathered in Hong Kong. Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer of Times Higher Education (THE), put it bluntly: The world is witnessing a serious tilt in the balance of power in international higher education and research from West to East. He cited an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report from March showing that China has now surpassed the United States in total research and development investment — a milestone that would have seemed fantastical a generation ago.
Yet for all the weight of that statistic, the most important point Baty made was that new knowledge creation is not a zero-sum game. This is a principle Hong Kong must internalize if we are to make the most of the moment history has handed us. Hong Kong’s role is not to replace London or Boston, but is to connect them with Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen — to be, as Nancy Ip Yuk-yu, president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, rightly framed it, a city that shapes the direction of innovation, talent development and societal transformation globally.
The numbers suggest we are closer to that goal than the skeptics admit. In the QS World University Rankings 2026, nine Hong Kong institutions are listed, with five of them among the top 100, and Hong Kong has achieved the highest overall improvement in Asia and the second-highest globally. The University of Hong Kong advanced six positions to 11th place globally, a new record, while the Chinese University of Hong Kong rose from 36th to 32nd, its best performance since 2010. For a city of just 7.5 million people, this is an extraordinary showing — the kind of density of excellence usually associated only with the American Ivy corridor.
But rankings are a lagging indicator. What matters now is whether Hong Kong can convert academic prestige into an enduring ecosystem that attracts, retains and deploys global talent. Here, the city’s strategy has become strikingly coherent. The Education Bureau’s Task Force on Study in Hong Kong, which held its second meeting on April 17, has been systematically promoting the “Study in Hong Kong” brand through initiatives such as Study in Hong Kong Week in February and the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education 2026 Conference, which the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government proudly noted showcased Hong Kong’s unique strengths as an international postsecondary education hub with the largest scale and highest number of participants since the association’s establishment in 2004. The message is simple: We are open, we are ambitious, and we are here to stay.
A country’s rise is measured not only in GDP or shipping tonnage, but in whose universities the world’s brightest minds choose to call home. For the first time in modern history, that choice increasingly points eastward
Crucially, this push is not confined to universities. The task force has extended the “Study in Hong Kong” brand to primary and secondary schools, recognizing that global families increasingly choose a city for the totality of its educational offer, not merely its flagship campuses. That insight — that basic and tertiary education must evolve together — is one that Singapore and London have long understood, and one that Hong Kong has been late to embrace. No longer.
The physical expression of this ambition is, of course, the Northern Metropolis University Town. The government has reserved roughly 90 hectares of land for the project and, as the financial secretary confirmed in the 2026-27 Budget, has allocated HK$10 billion ($1.28 billion) in loans to fast-track campus construction. What makes the project genuinely transformative, however, is not its land allocation but its intent. Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu has personally courted Chinese mainland heavyweights, meeting in March with the party chief of Tsinghua University and inviting leading institutions to bring their top disciplines into the Northern Metropolis. Peking University and others have signaled interest, and private champions like Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd have urged Beijing to encourage further participation.
This is exactly the kind of integration that Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, had in mind when, as Secretary for Education Choi Yuk-lin said, he recently urged Hong Kong’s higher-education institutions to fully leverage the strengths of the city’s education brand advantages and its international characteristics. Aligning with the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) is not a ritualistic phrase; it is the operational framework through which Hong Kong secures the resources, partnerships and policy support to punch above its weight.
Still, ambition alone will not deliver results. The city must prove that its strategy works empirically. That is why the Chief Executive’s Policy Unit’s support for a Hang Seng University study — led by Professor Mok Ka-ho and benchmarking Hong Kong against Singapore, Malaysia and the United Kingdom — is so significant. The study’s findings, which Mok will present at a conference coorganized with the Centre for Global Higher Education at the University of Oxford, highlight Hong Kong’s effective use of scholarships and research funding, along with its attractive immigration and education policies, and its free and superior academic environment. These are not slogans; they are conclusions drawn from comparative research, carried to the heart of the Anglophone academic establishment.
As Lim Mei Mei, THE’s president of Asia-Pacific, cautioned, what remains is the hardest question of all: carving out a distinctive identity. Hong Kong cannot simply imitate Singapore’s biomedical profile or Boston’s venture-capital muscle. We must decide, with clarity, which research frontiers we will own — whether in artificial intelligence and robotics, in Chinese medicine and life sciences, in green finance and fintech, or in the cultural scholarship that flows naturally from our bilingual, bi-systemic identity. The integration of traditional Chinese elements into cutting-edge research, as Lim observed, is already drawing strong global interest.
The opportunity before us is generational. A country’s rise is measured not only in GDP or shipping tonnage, but in whose universities the world’s brightest minds choose to call home. For the first time in modern history, that choice increasingly points eastward — and Hong Kong, by design and by destiny, is the door. Our task is to keep it open, wide and welcoming, while never forgetting where the house stands.
The author is the convener 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.
