The global wealth landscape is being reordered. As geopolitical volatility intensifies and capital migrates from West to East, the world’s ultrahigh-net-worth families are quietly recalibrating their priorities. The defining question is no longer how to maximize returns, but how to ensure that wealth, and the values behind it, survive intact across 50 or 100 years. Succession, not speculation, has become the central anxiety of global wealth.
On this question, Hong Kong’s answer is increasingly difficult to ignore. By the end of 2025, the city was home to 3,384 single-family offices, an increase of over 25 percent in just two years, with more than half managing family wealth of $51 million or above. These offices alone contribute around HK$12.6 billion ($1.6 billion) annually in operating expenditures to the local economy and sustain more than 10,000 full-time professional jobs. The broader foundations are equally formidable: The Securities and Futures Commission’s latest survey recorded assets under management of HK$42.2 trillion at the end of 2025, an all-time high, up 20 percent year-on-year, while net fund inflows surged 193 percent. Hong Kong now stands as the world’s largest cross-border wealth-management center, and hosts the second-largest population of ultrahigh-net-worth individuals of any city globally.
Yet numbers alone do not explain why families entrust their legacies to this city. Practitioners across cultures speak of the “three-generation curse”: The Chinese observation Fu bu guo san dai (family fortunes rarely outlast their founders’ grandchildren) echoes the American idiom “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”. Studies long cited in the wealth-management industry suggest that when succession fails, the cause is seldom poor investment performance; it is overwhelmingly breakdowns in family communication and trust, unprepared heirs, and the absence of institutionalized governance. In other words, preserving wealth across generations is less a financial problem than an institutional one. It demands an anchor jurisdiction offering legal certainty, governance expertise, and policy stability.
This is precisely where Hong Kong’s value proposition is unmatched, and the evidence is already visible. According to the latest market research commissioned by Invest Hong Kong, 40 percent of single-family offices here already have second-generation members in leadership roles, with third and even fourth generations participating in some. The great Asian wealth transfer is not merely being planned in Hong Kong; it is being executed here.
Three structural advantages underpin this. First, legal certainty. The family trust, the core instrument of succession, values the predictability the city’s common law system provides. Crucially, the 2013 modernization of the Trustee Ordinance abolished the rule against perpetuities, allowing families to establish trusts of unlimited duration and to shield core wealth from fragmentation as the lineage expands. For a family planning a century ahead, a perpetual trust under an independent Judiciary is an advantage of a different order.
Second, a world-class governance ecosystem. Hong Kong concentrates the trust lawyers, tax specialists, and wealth-management advisers that families need to build family councils and family constitutions — the very structures that, as widely reported, have enabled homegrown dynasties such as the Lee Kum Kee family to sustain their enterprise across five generations. The Hong Kong Academy for Wealth Legacy now institutionalizes this expertise, educating next-generation leaders and connecting families to philanthropy.
Third, legislative agility. Since the 2023 profits tax concession for family-owned investment holding vehicles, notable for requiring no preapproval and imposing no restriction on where assets are invested, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has continued to refine the regime in close dialogue with the legislature and industry. The Inland Revenue (Amendment) (Preferential Tax Regimes for Funds, Family-owned Investment Holding Vehicles and Carried Interest) Bill 2026, which is expected to be passed within this legislative session, will apply retrospectively from the assessment year of 2025-26. It extends qualifying investments to digital assets, precious metals, loans, overseas real estate, and even emission allowances and carbon credits, keeping pace not only with how modern families allocate capital, but also with how the next generation increasingly ties wealth to sustainability.
All of this rests on the foundation of the “one country, two systems” principle. The perfect combination of common law, free capital flows, a freely convertible currency, and robust privacy create a favorable environment for single family offices’ asset management. The result is privileged access to the Chinese mainland’s growth, positioning their capital to co-invest directly in the real economy and technological breakthroughs driving the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The market has voted accordingly: The New Capital Investment Entrant Scheme has drawn some 4,300 applications, representing expected investment of HK$150 billion.
The 2025 Policy Address set a target of assisting over 220 more family offices to establish or expand in Hong Kong by the end of 2028. The target is likely to be exceeded. For families across Asia and beyond asking where their legacy will be safest for the next 100 years, Hong Kong offers not merely a financial center, but a strategic safe haven — where wealth, values and purpose are passed on, generation after generation.
The author is a member of the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and a Hong Kong deputy to the National People’s Congress.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
