From Hong Kong to Xiānggǎng — why Hong Kong is better with China

(Edited and refined by Bai Kelei, with the assistance of AI translation.)

To boost economic growth, the Hong Kong government has recently staged a series of international football friendlies featuring some of the world’s top clubs. By attracting local and overseas football fans and travellers, it hopes to drive spending on hotels, dining and retail.

A friend invited me to the 5 August match between English Premier League giants Chelsea and Italian powerhouse Juventus, but I declined since I had just watched another Premier League heavyweight, Manchester City, play Italian champions Inter Milan. That brought to mind an episode from more than a decade ago.

In 2008, Macau’s economy took off rapidly following the liberalisation of its casino licensing regime. One gaming operator splashed out to bring Chelsea to Macau for the first time to play Chinese Super League club Chengdu Blades, hoping to burnish the city’s credentials as a tourist destination. I travelled to Macau for the poorly attended match. Upon returning to Hong Kong, I wrote a fairly pessimistic commentary for Lianhe Zaobao, arguing that Macau’s economic structure was excessively reliant on gaming and that the city was suffering from what economists call the “Dutch disease”.

The article sparked a thoughtful discussion in Macau’s public discourse. Some agreed that the city’s resources were severely imbalanced, with skilled workers, land and capital flowing into the gaming sector, making it difficult for its small and medium-sized enterprises to hire staff and driving up rents. Others argued that Macau’s economy was embattled. As long as gaming remained a powerful economic engine, they said, the city would continue to prosper.

‘Hong Kong of old’ finished?

Coincidentally, Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, also published an article in late July criticising some of Hong Kong’s recent changes. He even argued that the “Hong Kong of old” was finished, sparking widespread controversy in the city.

Roach’s criticisms centred on three points. First, Hong Kong’s economy had become wholly dependent on mainland China and had lost its global character. Second, the special administrative region’s politics and judiciary were heavily constrained and dependent on Beijing. Third, the mainlandisation of the city’s character and demographic make-up as foreign talent departs.

Roach once lived in Hong Kong and has commented periodically on the city in recent years. In 2024, he declared that Hong Kong was “over”, only to change tack in 2025 and speak of its “rebirth”. This time, he again claimed that the “Hong Kong of old” was finished. Objectively speaking, some of his observations are indeed correct. In recent years, for instance, Hong Kong’s integration with Shenzhen, Guangzhou and other cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area has accelerated, steadily drawing it closer to the mainland.

Some parts of his article, however, are not borne out by the facts. Hong Kong did experience an exodus of talent following the social unrest of 2019, but foreign professionals have gradually returned in recent years. Foreign media recently reported that Hong Kong issued more than 31,000 work visas to foreign nationals last year, more than double the number five years earlier. Most applicants came from the UK, Japan and South Korea. The number of foreign visas issued in the financial services sector rose 17% year on year, the highest since 2022.

This is largely because Hong Kong is relatively safe and stable amid the current global turbulence. In particular, under “one country, two systems”, Hong Kong is both an international financial centre connected to the world and a premier gateway providing access to mainland China, making it highly attractive to international capital.

The biggest problem with Roach’s “Hong Kong is over” argument is that “mainlandisation” was originally a neutral term, a factual observation summarising how Hong Kong’s society, economy and way of life were gradually converging with those of mainland China, without inherently carrying either praise or criticism. By viewing the term in a negative light, Roach overlooked what others could learn from mainland China, giving his argument a subjective and emotional cast.

This reflects a lingering nostalgia for the colonial era on his part. Roach still defines Hong Kong’s international character as something that must be predicated on keeping the mainland at arm’s length, and remains enamoured with the Western-dominated entrepot model of the 1990s. He appears not to understand that with changes to the international landscape, Hong Kong has evolved from being “the West’s window on China” into China’s international financial centre. Hong Kong’s future value lies in using Common Law and the free flow of capital to connect the vast economic hinterland of mainland China directly with global markets, rather than deliberately maintaining a distance.

Hong Kong is an open society that safeguards freedom of speech, and clashes among diverse views are entirely normal. The rational response is to respect everyone’s right to speak before responding with objective facts and sound reasoning.

An argument for more rationality

Unfortunately, Roach has not been as fortunate as I was. Besides articles with implicit criticism of him by Hong Kong government officials, members of the city’s pro-establishment camp have spent the past ten days publishing rebuttals against what they see as his attempts to put Hong Kong down. Some of the responses have been overly emotional, fuelling the debate and producing a counterproductive Streisand effect. As a result, Roach’s views have gained even wider international circulation.

In 1995, Fortune magazine published a cover story entitled “The Death of Hong Kong”, predicting that the city would lose its lustre as an international financial centre and its advantages as a free economy after 1997. The Hong Kong government made no concerted effort to rebut the article after the handover. A decade later, Fortune published a follow-up article acknowledging that its earlier prediction had been overly pessimistic and affirming that Hong Kong had remained vibrant despite the Asian financial crisis and the SARS epidemic.

Donald Tsang, who served as Hong Kong’s secretary for the treasury, financial secretary and chief executive, once shared that he had kept Fortune’s pessimistic article on his desk for years as a constant reminder to remain vigilant. Hong Kong society, particularly its government, need not respond so heatedly to Roach’s views. Instead, it should follow Tsang’s example and use them as motivation to prove Roach’s prediction wrong. 

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “罗奇的香港“玩完论””.

Related: From Hong Kong to Xiānggǎng | 25 years after the handover: The ‘end for Hong Kong’ or just the beginning?