Dominic Lee says the city is the vital link connecting national planning to global markets, and Chinese mainland scale to international standards

Every year, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region plays host to a great many forums, and it is fair to ask whether the city needs another one. Yet the Greater Bay Area Conference 2026 — coorganized by China Daily and the Hong Kong Coalition and taking place on Thursday — deserves closer attention than the usual conference-season fare; not because roughly 250 officials, diplomats, executives, and academics will gather in one room, but because of what the organizers have chosen to put on the agenda. Financial connectivity, the space economy, and artificial intelligence in education: three subjects that, at first glance, appear to have little in common. Look again, and they trace the outline of the only development strategy that makes sense for a city of 7.5 million people in the opening year of the nation’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30).

Start with finance, because that is where Hong Kong’s case is strongest and where the temptation to complacency is greatest. The doubters who spent the past few years predicting the decline of the city as an international financial center have been comprehensively answered by the market itself. In the first half of 2026, Hong Kong raised HK$209.9 billion ($26.77 billion) across 85 new listings — the strongest first-half performance in five years, with funds raised nearly doubling year-on-year and with more than twice as many deals. The exchange finished second globally, behind only Nasdaq which was propelled by the launch of SpaceX, the single largest initial public offering in history. Deloitte’s Southern Region Managing Partner Edward Au made the pointed observation that had SpaceX listed elsewhere, Hong Kong would have narrowly taken the world’s top spot. Some 600 applications were queued for approval as of May, and this week alone brings the debuts of Shein and Mech-Mind Robotics Technologies, the latter an embodied-AI and industrial robotics firm raising funds to broaden its application scenarios and accelerate commercialization.

What matters more than the league-table position is the composition of that pipeline. “A+H” listings and specialist technology flotations together accounted for more than 70 percent of first-half proceeds, and 121 Chinese mainland A-share companies had filed to list here by late June. This is the superconnector function working precisely as designed: Mainland champions in hard technology use Hong Kong’s common-law framework, free capital flows and convertible currency to reach global investors, while international capital gains regulated access to the most dynamic industrial ecosystem on earth. Hong Kong now handles roughly 75 percent of global offshore renminbi settlement. In October, the city will host the APEC Finance Ministers’ Meeting for the first time — its most significant ministerial gathering since the World Trade Organization conference of 2005. That is not ceremonial. It is a platform on which to demonstrate, to 21 economies at once, that the “one country, two systems” framework is a competitive advantage rather than a talking point.

If finance is where Hong Kong already leads, the space economy is where it must decide whether it intends to compete at all. Here the honest assessment is that the city has been slow. Guangdong has moved with characteristic speed, issuing an action plan for commercial space development covering 2024 to 2028 and following it with policy measures offering rewards of up to 15 million yuan ($2.23 million) per project for satellite terminal manufacturing; Guangzhou’s Nansha district alone subsidizes as much as 20 percent of qualifying research and development expenditure. Meanwhile Hong Kong has three satellite licensees operating a grand total of 10 geostationary satellites, and only recently began studying how to streamline the licensing regime for low-earth-orbit constellations. Scholars at the University of Hong Kong have argued, rightly, that the 15th Five-Year Plan represents a “heavenly opportunity” — one that requires a dedicated space office, a serious effort to close talent and regulatory gaps, and genuine integration into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area rather than parallel effort.

The lesson generalizes. Hong Kong’s universities produce world-class work in payload design, miniaturization, and AI; its neighbors across the boundary possess the manufacturing depth, the launch capacity, and the industrial scale. Neither half is sufficient alone. The 2026 XAIR Expo opening in Guangzhou this week (Sept 3-6) — four days of embodied intelligence, matchmaking, and product premieres spanning manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and retail — is a reminder that the region’s hardware ecosystem is not waiting for anyone. Hong Kong’s contribution is capital, intellectual property protection, standards, dispute resolution, and access to the world. That division of labor is not a diminishment of the city’s role. It is the whole point of a world-class city cluster.

Which brings me to the panel on AI in education, in which I will be taking part, and to the subject I find most consequential of the three. Finance and space are industries; education is the precondition for both. The HKSAR government has moved decisively here, and it deserves credit. The Blueprint for Digital Education in Primary and Secondary Schools, released this year, arrives with two supplements — an AI Literacy Learning Framework and a practical guide to using AI in teaching — and is backed by an additional one-off grant of HK$500,000 to every publicly funded school under the AI for Empowering Learning and Teaching Funding Programme. Tiered professional training for serving teachers began in July, running through September, covering AI literacy, AI-plus-subjects and, crucially, AI leadership for principals. The stated ambition is unambiguous: AI for all schools, AI for all students. Schools are to fold digital education into their development plans from the coming academic year.

Still, a blueprint is not an outcome, and the harder questions begin where the funding circulars end. Ninety-eight percent of Hong Kong students will not become AI engineers; they will become nurses, accountants, logistics managers, and teachers who must work alongside these systems without surrendering their judgment to them. The risk is not that our children will fail to learn to use AI models. It is that they will learn to use them so fluently that they never learn to think without them. Teacher capacity is the binding constraint, and a subsidized platform license is no substitute for a teacher confident enough to tell a class of 15-year-olds why a plausible answer is nonetheless the wrong one. The Jockey Club’s GoAI project, cocreated with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and drawing on collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology , is recruiting 300 network schools with structured lesson sequences and peer-supported lesson study — exactly the patient, unglamorous work that determines whether policy survives contact with the classroom.

Hong Kong’s advantage in this decade will not come from any single sector. It will come from doing what few places can: connecting national strategy to global markets, and mainland scale to international standards. That requires a generation equipped to operate in both worlds. Building it is slower work than an initial public offering and less photogenic than a satellite launch. It is also the work that matters most.

The author is the convenor 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.