An old Chinese saying holds that “in all things, success depends on preparation; without it, there is failure”. Few pieces of policy have captured that spirit as vividly as Hong Kong’s first five-year plan, unveiled by Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu on Wednesday, immediately followed by his 2026 Policy Address. Coming after a 60-day public consultation that drew more than 17,000 submissions from residents, professional bodies, political parties and chambers of commerce, the plan marks a structural pivot in how the city governs itself, adding a medium-term, whole-of-government blueprint to a tradition of annual policymaking.
Lee himself has been candid about why the two documents were released side by side. “The five-year plan draws the eyes of a dragon, while the Policy Address draws the entire dragon”, he said in the run-up to Wednesday’s session, vivid shorthand for the idea that the plan sets direction while the Policy Address turns direction into delivery.
Economically, the plan leaves little doubt about where Hong Kong’s next phase of growth must come from. It commits the city to strengthening “four centers and one hub” — its international financial, maritime, trade and innovation and technology (I&T) centers, alongside a hub for high-caliber talent — while also reinforcing its role as an international aviation hub. It pushes hard on “finance+”, the policy thread first spotlighted in Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po’s 2026-27 Budget speech.
Finance+ is a deceptively simple concept: Harness Hong Kong’s financial depth to serve the real economy, channeling capital into I&T, trade, green development, intellectual property, maritime services and livelihood-related industries, rather than treating finance as an end in itself. The plan builds on this by pledging to refine the offshore renminbi ecosystem, widen mutual market access through the Stock Connect, Bond Connect and Wealth Management Connect programs, and develop a commodities-trading ecosystem anchored in gold — moves squarely aimed at consolidating the city’s role as the world’s largest offshore RMB business hub and a world-leading cross-boundary wealth management center.
I&T sits at the very heart of the blueprint, and the numbers tell their own story. Hong Kong intends to lift its expenditure on innovation activities, as a share of GDP, to 3 percent after 2030, up from roughly 1.63 percent in 2024 — effectively aiming to nearly double the share of GDP devoted to innovation activities over the longer term.
Lee envisages a Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area-based I&T hub serving the entire country taking shape in five years. That is a strikingly specific vision for a city long associated with property and conventional finance, and it should not be dismissed as rhetoric: The plan operationalizes it through the “three major I&T parks and five key research and development institutions” paradigm, linking the Hong Kong I&T park in the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone, San Tin Technopole, the Hong Kong Science Park and Cyberport into a “north-central-south” development corridor. Five flagship institutions — covering productivity, applied science, microelectronics, artificial intelligence and life-and-health technology — will anchor the research base, while the Hong Kong Microelectronics Research and Development Institute has been tasked with operating the city’s first national manufacturing innovation center by 2027.
AI, unsurprisingly, threads through nearly every part of the document. The plan formally embeds an “AI+ Initiative”, promoting the deep integration of AI across sectors under the twin directions of “industries for AI” and “AI for industries” — in other words, building the AI industry itself while also using AI to transform traditional and emerging industries alike, from life sciences and robotics to microelectronics, new energy, advanced manufacturing and new materials. Alongside AI, the plan explicitly earmarks quantum technology and embodied intelligence as future industries to plan for now rather than later, a degree of technological foresight rarely seen in Hong Kong policymaking in the past. It is worth recalling that the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2025 ranking of global innovation clusters placed the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster first worldwide — evidence that this ambition rests on genuine, measurable momentum rather than aspiration alone. The plan also commits to developing an international health and medical innovation hub, with regulatory reform to allow independent evaluation and faster approval of innovative drugs and medical devices, and closer interfacing of clinical trial resources between Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
None of this can be separated from the Northern Metropolis, which the plan elevates from a megaproject to an organizing principle for the city’s entire spatial future. A university town composed of San Tin, Hung Shui Kiu and Ta Kwu Ling is to be built around a “one town, five elements” concept integrating education, technology, industry, talent and urban living, with a combined area of more than 1,000 hectares (10 square kilometers).
Roughly 900 hectares of “spade-ready” sites will be released from 2026-27 to 2030-31, enough to support more than 70,000 housing units and a million sq meters of economic floor space, backed by a new Northern Metropolis Development Bill and designed to streamline approvals and an “eight vertical and eight horizontal corridors” transport network.
Lee directly addressed “concern” about Hong Kong’s laissez-faire credentials in an opinion article published in the South China Morning Post on Monday, asserting the blueprint would not alter the city’s capitalist system but rather deploy it more purposefully, ultimately aiming to enable residents to flourish through job creation and upward mobility. That framing matters, and it appears to reflect what stakeholders actually asked for: Several business groups including the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, among the most vocal voices in the more than 17,000 submissions received during consultation, specifically urged the government to prioritize the Northern Metropolis, financial center status and an AI strategy — precisely the pillars the plan has chosen to foreground. The Greater Bay Area, home to more than 87 million people and roughly $2.23 trillion in combined GDP, gives these ambitions a market large enough to matter globally, not merely regionally, and reinforces why cross-boundary connectivity, from Payment Connect to the digital yuan, features so prominently across the plan’s economic chapters.
What emerges from Wednesday’s twin unveiling is that Hong Kong is planning its next five years with the same rigor it has long demanded of the investors, developers and entrepreneurs who plan their own immediate futures. The five-year plan does not abandon the improvisational, opportunity-seizing instincts that built the city’s postwar prosperity; rather, it disciplines them, giving finance, innovation, talent and infrastructure a common horizon and a shared set of goals for the first time in the SAR’s history.
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.
