Politics

It made perfect sense for Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu to hold public consultations on both the city’s first five-year plan and the last policy address of his current term at the same time. Many have been putting forward views that warrant serious consideration.It is clear that Lee needs to be bolder when it comes to the “new chapter” he promised in 2022 when he was elected. The Northern Metropolis is only one part of the city’s transformation; his coming policy address must lay out the rest.Hong Kong is well established as a global financial centre but we still need audacious changes. The good news is the groundwork has been laid. We are already the world’s largest offshore yuan trade settlement centre, and the recent launch of offshore Chinese government bond futures in the...

Hong Kong will fly the national and regional flags at half-staff at various government sites on Tuesday to mourn the late former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji.The government said on Sunday it would lower the flags at government headquarters in Admiralty, Government House, all control points and checkpoints at border crossings and Hong Kong International Airport.The tribute will be paid on the day of Zhu’s cremation, in accordance with a notice issued by state news agency Xinhua. China’s late premier Zhu Rongji remembered as the chief engineer of economic transformationIt said that the national flag would also be flown at half-staff at various sites across the country, including Tiananmen Square, Xinhua Gate, the Great Hall of the People and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing.Known as ...

Regional cooperation is a key priority in Hong Kong’s first five-year plan. In the fourth of a five-part series on the plan, we look at how life in the Greater Bay Area can get better, with the right policies. Read part one here, part two here and part three here.Eager to escape Hong Kong’s suffocating housing conditions, university administrative worker Polly Chan decided in 2023 to rent a weekend flat in Guangzhou.On weekdays, she lives with her mother in a cramped 300 sq ft flat in Tai Po. On weekends, she does a two-hour commute via the East Rail line and Shenzhen North to her sanctuary for solitude: a 1,000 sq ft flat in Guangzhou that she rents for just 1,000 yuan (US$148) a month.It is a steal compared with rental prices in Shenzhen which can reach as high as 7,000 yuan a month and ...

Hong Kong has changed since the turmoil of 2019-20. Few people would dispute this. The more important question is what kind of city it is becoming.It is evolving into a more nationally integrated yet still distinctive city. The emerging model seeks to combine market dynamism and international connectivity with clearer alignment to national development. This is not decline. It is a search for a viable identity and role.Critics such as Stephen Roach have argued that the Hong Kong of old is finished and that the city has become little more than another large Chinese city. The conclusion rests on a particular assumption: that sharp political and institutional change, especially when it compresses earlier expectations of autonomy, amounts to the end of the place itself. This assumption is selec...

Former Hong Kong opposition leader Wu Chi-wai, who has been granted permission to enter the United Kingdom, will not be deported despite earlier complications in his attempt to settle in the country, the British immigration minister has confirmed.In a written reply on Thursday to former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten, UK Minister for Migration and Citizenship Jo White stressed that overseas convictions should not lead to the automatic refusal of settlement applications under the British National (Overseas) route.Wu, former chairman of the now-defunct Democratic Party and an ex-lawmaker, was initially refused entry at London Heathrow Airport earlier this month before being granted temporary admission.He was released from a Hong Kong prison in late June after serving four years and five mon...

Last week, Xia Baolong, Beijing’s point man on Hong Kong and Macau affairs, made a two-day trip to the city to review the Hong Kong government’s progress across many areas.Everything seems to have been orchestrated with precision. Ahead of Xia’s arrival, the government launched its two-month public consultation on the city’s first five-year plan. The day after Xia concluded his visit, the government released its 200-plus page report on the impact of its targeted poverty alleviation strategy.The same day, the International Institute for Management Development released the results of the latest World Competitiveness Ranking. Hong Kong has risen one place to the world’s second-most competitive economy. All this offered a timely reminder of what the administration had accomplished.The result-o...

Hong Kong election authorities have stopped compiling voter turnout data by age and sex, citing a lack of operational need, in a move that has raised concerns about undermining the transparency of polls.Analysts and politicians said such statistics were valuable for election hopefuls in understanding voter demographics and formulating policy suggestions, while authorities could use the data to improve governance.The South China Morning Post asked the Registration and Electoral Office last month for voter turnout figures by age and sex from last year’s Legislative Council election under the Code on Access to Information.Such data had been routinely disclosed to the public since at least 2008, but the office said that it no longer saw a need to compile and maintain such statistics.The SCMP r...

The Chinese embassy in the UK has called on the British government to “stop its acts of slander and suppression” after a court jailed two men linked to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London for up to 10 years for spying on activists.Bill Yuen Chung-biu, a manager at the office, was sentenced on Thursday to eight years behind bars for assisting a foreign intelligence service, while co-defendant Peter Wai Chi-leung, a security firm operator and former part-time UK Border Force officer, was imprisoned for 10 years for the same charge and another for misconduct in a public office.Yuen, a retired police superintendent, was accused of passing surveillance requests from Hong Kong authorities to Wai while working at the trade office.Wai was said to have used his position as a UK Border...

China’s five-year plan responds to “great changes unseen in a century”, prescient words used by President Xi Jinping since 2018. Chinese policymakers have anticipated headwinds in the world system, underscored by the upending of the “rules-based world order” by US President Donald Trump’s “law of the jungle” and a world increasingly threatened by climate change.Recent China-US summits notwithstanding, great-power rivalry is likely to remain for a fairly long time, fragmenting trade, technological flows, supply chains and geopolitics. However, opportunities are opening up for cutting-edge technologies and closer relations with the larger world, including Europe and the Global South.The 15th five-year plan focuses on high-quality development with moderate but stable growth; technological sel...

The Hong Kong government has launched a public consultation on the city’s first five-year development plan, a blueprint aimed at aligning with China’s newly approved 15th five-year plan. Officials have promised a “macroscopic, strategic and forward-looking” road map that will guide Hong Kong’s economic and social development for the rest of this decade.That invitation to think in five-year horizons is precisely why Hong Kong must now think bigger about its place in the world – not only as “Asia’s world city” but as a serious contender to become Asia’s multilateral hub.A quiet but profound shift is under way in the architecture of global governance. It is not the product of a grand design but of a vacuum.The United States, long the anchor of the multilateral system, is stepping back at a sp...