Freewheeling Hong Kong takes cue from China with first five-year plan

{"text":[[{"start":8.695,"text":"Hong Kong has unveiled its first-ever five-year plan, a sweeping economic blueprint that is seen as bringing policymaking in the once freewheeling entrepôt more in line with China’s state-planning model."}],[{"start":21.246,"text":"The plan, which covers the period to 2030 and was released alongside city leader John Lee’s annual policy address, marked a significant departure for a financial hub that until the 1960s resisted gathering GDP data for fear of encouraging state intervention."}],[{"start":37.865,"text":"“The five-year plan is Hong Kong’s economic and societal blueprint for the next five years. It is a forward-looking, strategic and directional guiding document,” Lee told the city’s legislature on Wednesday."}],[{"start":50.46,"text":"The five-year plan, which coincides with mainland China’s own 15th five-year plan, touches on areas including a future mega-metropolis under construction in Hong Kong’s northern reaches and efforts to strengthen technology and industry, as well as the promotion of traditional Chinese medicine and food processing."}],[{"start":68.32,"text":"In an op-ed published in local media earlier in the week, Lee also offered reassurances that the plan did not herald the demise of capitalism. “I have also been asked whether formulating a five-year plan would change Hong Kong’s original system. The answer is no,” Lee wrote. “The plan will uphold Hong Kong’s rule of law and capitalist system.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":88.56,"text":"Five-year plans are often seen as a relic of communist command economies. Russia quietly abandoned its five-year plans after the fall of the Soviet Union."}],[{"start":97.44,"text":"But five-year plans continue to play an important role in China, where the Chinese Communist Party uses them to lend official imprimatur to top priorities and direct industrial policy across the vast state-owned sector."}],[{"start":110.32,"text":"The first five-year plan under Mao Zedong in 1953 set out ambitious industrialisation targets and paved the way for the collectivisation of most of the nation’s farms. Beijing’s most recent five-year plan, unveiled this year, targets high-end industries such as semiconductors and biotechnology."}],[{"start":127.947,"text":"Authorities in Hong Kong, meanwhile, hope the city’s plan will rejuvenate an economy that has been battered by pro-democracy protests in 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit business confidence and triggered a population outflow."}],[{"start":142.96,"text":"Officials in the city have come under pressure from Beijing to deliver tangible gains on housing and new developments after cracking down on political dissent and civil society and overhauling the electoral system to ensure a “patriotic” legislature and, in effect, bar the opposition."}],[{"start":160.617,"text":"They also hope the plan will help diversify the economy beyond its traditional pillars of finance and trade and bind it closer to the Chinese mainland. Chinese companies have driven a listings boom on Hong Kong’s stock exchange, and more of its new graduates have settled in the city under preferential immigration schemes."}],[{"start":179.68,"text":"The plan’s real significance was in how it demonstrated a new, more active mode of policymaking, said Gary Ng, senior economist at French investment bank Natixis"}],[{"start":191.68,"text":"“We can talk about many of the . . . details, but it is really about the change in the way of policymaking,” he said."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":197.894,"text":"One major focus is the Northern Metropolis mega-project, a plan to redevelop a swath of territory into industrial, technology and logistics hubs to take advantage of the tech and manufacturing booms that powered neighbouring Guangdong province and the megacity of Shenzhen. Planners hope the project area will eventually house a third of Hong Kong’s population and create 650,000 jobs."}],[{"start":221.575,"text":"It will also include the construction of 70,000 homes over the next five years, which officials say will help ease a decades-long housing crisis in the city that Beijing views as having fuelled the 2019 protests."}],[{"start":234.88,"text":"Other parts of the plan focus on boosting sectors including finance, technology and tourism."}],[{"start":240.88,"text":"But experts said official intervention could threaten the vigorous free markets that characterised Hong Kong in the past. Economist Milton Friedman described Hong Kong as the best example of a free-market economy in action, while the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing US think-tank, ranked the city’s economy as the freest in the world for 21 consecutive years until 2015."}],[{"start":263.04,"text":"In the 1960s, colonial financial secretary John Cowperthwaite even refused to collect GDP data for fear that doing so would spur officials to meddle in the economy."}],[{"start":274.24,"text":"“The dynamism and vitality that is the hallmark of [Hong Kong’s] economy was historically based on the entrepreneurial spirit of its people and non-interference from the government,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at Soas."}],[{"start":287.814,"text":"A five-year plan represented “a reversal” of that legacy, Tsang added. “I doubt that it will make the economy more vibrant and able to adapt to changing market conditions. But it brings [Hong Kong] in line with the practice on the Chinese mainland.”"}],[{"start":303.36,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1789550442_9471.mp3"}