Priscilla Chan’s canto-pop love songs, Andy Lau’s motorcycle punk, and Central’s bustling Exchange Square together formed a generation of mainlanders’ beautiful memory of the “Pearl of the Orient.” The handover in 1997 and, more recently, the imposition of the National Security Law have both brought considerable uncertainty, prompting a large exodus of local residents while attracting more newcomers mostly from the mainland. This has naturally raised the question of whether Hong Kong can still retain its cultural and political distinctiveness.
Wang Xiangwei, a veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, argues that this concern is misplaced. In his view, it fixates on superficial demographic shifts while overlooking the fact that Hong Kong’s real appeal and competitive edge lie in its long-standing institutional differences from the mainland.
Wang Xiangwei is a senior visiting scholar (2026-27) at the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy School, and a former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post. He started his career at the China Daily before moving to the UK, where he worked at a number of news organizations, including the BBC Chinese Service. He moved to Hong Kong in 1993 and worked at the Eastern Express before joining the Post in 1996 as a China business reporter. He became SCMP’s China editor in 2000 and deputy editor in 2007, a position he held for four years before being promoted to editor-in-chief (2012-2015). He has a master’s degree in journalism and a bachelor’s degree in English.
Alice Liu: Mr. Wang, you spent many years observing both Hong Kong and mainland China. Could you share a bit about your early life and career trajectory? I understand that you lived in Hong Kong for many years and worked as a journalist for the South China Morning Post.
Xiangwei Wang: Thank you for having me. I was born and raised in mainland China. I came to Hong Kong in ’93 and have lived there on and off for more than 30 years. I worked for the South China Morning Post, Asia’s leading English-language newspaper, for 26 years. The SCMP was founded in 1903, and over the past more than 120 years, it has focused on reporting what we call Greater China: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. SCMP’s coverage of mainland China is what drew most readers and is highly valued by its readers in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
I started as a China business reporter and later became China business editor. In the 2000, I was promoted to SCMP’s China editor. In 2012, I became SCMP’s editor-in-chief, and I stepped aside as editor-in-chief in 2016. At the beginning of 2016, Alibaba bought SCMP. I advised SCMP on its coverage from 2016 to 2022. In sum, from the year 2000 to October 2022, I basically drove SCMP’s China coverage, and I’m very proud of my work as the senior editor.
The very first day I became SCMP’s China editor, I told my colleagues that China’s rise was inevitable, that its impact on the rest of the world would only increase, and that my goal was to allow readers to have authoritative, insightful ,and independent information on China. I’m very happy to see that despite the difficulties that the media are facing, SCMP is still going from strength to strength. As US-China competition intensifies, readers globally are all keen to get the Chinese perspective on things. Even though I’m no longer with SCMP, I’ve been told by ex-colleagues that SCMP gets increasingly more traffic from the U.S. and other English-speaking countries in the West.
In October 2022, I decided to leave. I had already risen to the top of Chinese journalism and wanted to try something else. I believe I have knowledge and experience in writing about China’s politics that I can pass on to young journalists and students of journalism. In January 2023, I joined Hong Kong Baptist University and taught journalism, media, and communication at HKBU for nearly four years.
Because studying and researching China-U.S. relations has always been my primary passion, and given that China-U.S. relations today are at a very critical crossroads, I applied to the Harvard Kennedy School. I am now a senior visiting scholar at the HKS Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia Program and will be in the States for a year to research and study U.S.-China relations.
AL: Hong Kong is predominantly an ethnic-Chinese city with its distinct cultural-linguistic identity. Over the past few years is Hong Kong becoming more Chinese, or is it becoming less distinctly Hong Kong? In your mind, are these two issues the same matter?
XW: Ever since Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, it has always been predominantly a Chinese city. Even though it was under British control for more than 100 years, over 90% of the residents who live in Hong Kong are Chinese. On that note, having more mainlanders living in Hong Kong does not make it less Hong Kong.
Most of Hong Kong’s residents’ ancestors can be traced back to mainland China. Hong Kong’s identity is surely different from that of mainland China from a political, social, and economic point of view. But I think it is a moot point to say that the influx of mainland Chinese will make Hong Kong “less Hong Kong.”
AL: There’s been this growing concern that the large influx of mainland immigrants will dilute Hong Kong’s cultural and political uniqueness and transform it into “just another Chinese city.” How do you, as an immigrant who’s spent 20-plus years in Hong Kong, understand these concerns about so-called “mainlandization”? Are they reasonable?
XW: Particularly over the past six or seven years, there has been a massive influx of mainland immigrants. According to various reports, over 200,000 or 300,000 local and foreign residents have left Hong Kong permanently due to their concerns about Hong Kong’s political future after the imposition of the National Security Law in June 2020. To make up for the shortfall, the Hong Kong government, over the past few years, has launched various talent schemes to attract immigrants to Hong Kong.
Since 2022, the government’s talent schemes have drawn extraordinary interest, as evidenced by half a million applications, more than 330,000 approvals, and over 220,000 arrivals. These talent schemes are, in effect, open to people around the world, but it is understandable that the majority of the newcomers were from the mainland.
Walk down the streets of Hong Kong these days, and you will see more Chinese EVs compared to Japanese or German cars and hear Mandarin spoken often, whether by tourists or investment bankers in Central, Hong Kong’s financial district. Downtown Hong Kong is dotted with Sichuan and Hunan restaurants, catering to mainlanders who like spicy food.
For those changes, the concerns appear understandable. But I argue they are very much misplaced. Firstly, Hong Kong has always grown through migration from the mainland. Most of the people in Hong Kong can trace their ancestry to mainland China. Waves of Cantonese-speaking farmers and fishermen from Guangdong province and well-capitalised entrepreneurs from Shanghai and Zhejiang province brought capital, skill, and ambition to turbocharge the post-war boom. People find today’s situation different because whereas in the past, most of the immigrants were from Cantonese-speaking Guangdong Province, right now they are coming from all the provinces other than Guangdong and are a Mandarin-speaking crowd.
Another interesting phenomenon is the influx of Chinese international students, who studied and worked in the United States, the UK, and other European countries. They return not to the mainland, but are settling in Hong Kong for its capitalist system, low taxes, and efficient governing system.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I was often invited to give talks at universities and other public events. I often found myself conversing with mainlanders who expressed their concerns that Hong Kong could lose its uniqueness. In fact, these new immigrants to Hong Kong are the population most concerned about Hong Kong becoming another Chinese city. From their vantage point, if Hong Kong becomes homogenised with the mainland, there’s no use in selling their assets, leaving their relatives, and coming down here.
One refrain from new friends echoes with haunting clarity: “We moved to Hong Kong precisely because it’s a capitalist city, much different from the mainland. If it starts looking and acting like just another Chinese city, what’s the point of being here?” That question highlights the crux of the issue. The real test for Hong Kong is not whether more Mandarin is heard on Queen’s Road or whether a spicy hotpot chain displaces a neighborhood diner. Those are superficial markers that ebb and flow with consumer preferences and demographics.
The test is whether the city’s institutional core stays intact: common law, clean and competitive public procurement, open and rules-based markets, and a government that communicates in the pragmatic, accountable language that has earned investors’ trust for decades. The city must distinguish between cosmetic and institutional change. Changes in restaurant rosters and car models are cosmetic. The institutional core, capitalist norms, rule of law, and outward-facing openness, is what has always made Hong Kong tick. Protect that core, and the new arrivals will strengthen the city rather than dilute it. Neglect it, and even those who came will ask, fairly, why they came at all.
AL: Let’s talk about the city for a little bit. What does Hong Kong still offer to the world that other cities, say, Shanghai or Singapore or Tokyo even, don’t?
XW: Yesterday, over lunch with some friends at Harvard, I was asked this particular question of how Hong Kong can compete with Shanghai or Shenzhen. My answer is very simple. I believe that Hong Kong still retains three main advantages that mainland cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen lack.
First, Hong Kong is a free port. As Asia’s financial center, Hong Kong has a free flow of capital, information, and people, whereas in mainland China, all three flows are under strict government control. Despite the imposition of the National Security Law, those freedoms were largely retained, or at least when compared to mainland cities.
Now, the second part of your question was about Hong Kong’s relative advantage compared to other overseas cities. Over the past 10 or 20 years, Hong Kong has always been compared to Singapore. But I have been making this case for many years: Hong Kong and Singapore serve two entirely different markets.
Hong Kong serves mainland China as a bridge for foreign investments flowing into the Chinese mainland. It also acts as a bridge for Chinese investments going overseas. As Hong Kong is uniquely situated, it offers a dual function that is very difficult for other cities to replace. Meanwhile, Singapore serves Southeast Asia. They serve different regions and markets.
Tokyo is an entirely different case. Tokyo is a financial center, just like Hong. Even though the Chinese economy is slowing down, it’s still the second-largest economy in the world. In my opinion, Hong Kong still plays the most important role in being the “super-connector,” as some Hong Kong officials put it, connecting China to the outside world.
AL: You noted how Beijing changed its approach to administering Hong Kong and described their mentality as seeing HK as “one of us.” What changed in the way that mainland officials treat Hong Kong that prompted you to put it this way, and exactly what does “one of us” look like?
XW: I must provide some context before I go into Beijing’s changing approach to Hong Kong. China’s first director of the Central Government’s Office in post-handover Hong Kong, the central government’s representative in HK, was Jiang Enzhu. He used to be a deputy foreign minister in China and China’s ambassador to the UK. Jiang was a very capable, liberal-minded official. His role was basically to help advise the Chinese government on Hong Kong affairs.
Jiang famously likened understanding the city to reading a challenging book, one that demands serious attention and effort. He spoke to the Chinese officials in Hong Kong confidentially, and later on, these remarks were made public: “Hong Kong is a very difficult book to read, and I’ll try my best to understand Hong Kong well.” At the time, his words served as a much-needed cautionary note to mainland officials, who were eager to try their hand at administering Hong Kong but often lacked relevant experience.
When Hong Kong was returned to Chinese sovereignty, many officials were elated that Hong Kong had finally become part of China. Yet wiser heads in Beijing, including Zhu Rongji, saw that Hong Kong was very different and understood that mainland thinking could meet resistance in running Hong Kong.
Jiang’s remark was spot on. He warned mainland officials against taking a mainland approach to Hong Kong without understanding Hong Kong. Unfortunately, after 2020, the central government no longer heeded the advice given by Jiang Enzhu. They made it very clear that Beijing assumed overall jurisdiction over Hong Kong.
Fast forward to today, the city remains a book that is difficult to decipher, but Chinese officials may not share Jiang’s eagerness to truly grasp its complexities. There are two things I don’t approve of. The first is that the main officials in China are very eager to take a hands-on approach to managing Hong Kong affairs. The second is that the political elites in Hong Kong are now looking to Beijing for guidance, something that I strongly disagree with, as mainland officials have no idea how to run a capitalist city like Hong Kong.
Now that they see Hong Kong as having finally become “one of us,” a triumphant feeling prevails among mainland officials who believe they can now apply mainland thinking, practices, and approaches to Hong Kong. I have written several articles warning Chinese officials against that, as I believe it to be very counterproductive. Top-level mainland officials have done a fantastic job building China into the world’s second-largest economy over the past 20 or 30 years. They are experts on running China, but none of them has much experience running a capitalist city like Hong Kong.
But as the saying goes, it takes two to tango. For many Hong Kong residents, the intricacies of Chinese politics have proven to be just as challenging to interpret. Over the past 28 years, have those people pessimistic about Hong Kong’s future genuinely tried to understand Beijing’s perspective, or have they simply acted on their own assumptions? One telling example is that a prominent opposition figure I know has not set foot on the mainland since 1997.
AL: You said that Hong Kong is increasingly becoming “one of us,” but it still should be allowed to do some things differently from the mainland. In what areas do you find it crucial that Hong Kong be allowed to operate differently?
XW: Historically, Hong Kong’s value lies in being different, with its common law and capitalist system. Since the founding of the PRC, Hong Kong has always served China well through its differences. Back in 1949, the PLA had by then pretty much liberated most of China. Troops converged on the mainland side of the border, and the PLA generals telegrammed Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai for permission to take back Hong Kong. At that time, there were only a few thousand British soldiers based in Hong Kong. If the PLA wanted to take Hong Kong, it would be like a flip of a hand.
Then Mao Zedong passed the message to the generals not to attack Hong Kong. What Mao said to the generals later became Beijing’s longstanding policy towards Hong Kong, which in Mandarin is called “長期打算、充分利用,” roughly translated as “long-term planning, full utilization.” HK proved itself useful one year later, when China was dragged into the Korean War. The U.S.-led Western capitalist bloc imposed unprecedented sanctions and an embargo against China. Hong Kong, being a British colony, was the only window through which China could interact with the outside world. China bought much-needed medicine for its troops and for ordinary people through Hong Kong, as well as other goods.
When Deng Xiaoping decided to open up China to the outside world in the late 1970s, Hong Kong was the place through which most of the foreign investment came. Up until 2025, over 60% of the cumulative FDI flowing into China over the past 30 years came through Hong Kong. That money used Hong Kong as the conduit into China. Hong Kong will become even more valuable for China in the future as relations between China and Western democracies are very much troubled. Hong Kong can potentially make interactions and engagement possible and easier than on the Chinese mainland.
One interesting example is that foreign business travelers visiting China are unable to access the social media sites they use daily, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. In contrast, Hong Kong does not prohibit any of these social media services. I have repeatedly stressed this point for the past few years: Hong Kong needs to do more to safeguard its “two systems” and differentiate itself from the mainland’s continental system.
AL: Deng Xiaoping is the main architect of China’s economic reforms and the “one country, two systems” framework for Hong Kong. Had Deng lived to today, what would he think of China and Hong Kong?
XW: People in my generation, myself included, are always grateful to Deng Xiaoping. I often joke to friends and HKBU students that, growing up, I’m always grateful to the two Dengs: Deng Xiaoping and Teresa Teng. Without Deng Xiaoping, people in my generation would not have had what we have today.
In recent years, China’s reform and opening-up efforts have been hamstrung by the rising ultra-leftist and nationalistic sentiment. Beijing is wisely seeking deeper integration into the world economy as a countermove, signaling a conciliatory approach towards its Western trading partners to defuse trade tensions and reassure the domestic private sector. But China’s leadership faces growing skepticism at home and abroad, partly because the country’s public discourse still seems hijacked by the ultra-leftist narrative that is fixated on guarding against foreign influence in the name of national security and patriotism.
The rising ultra-leftist and nationalistic sentiment in China was something that Deng was very much concerned about. A pragmatist who was purged three times in his lifetime, he repeatedly warned that the Party should primarily guard against an ultra-leftist tendency, even as it should stay vigilant against veering right.
He warned repeatedly that it should primarily guard against the rising leftist influences. And I totally agree with that. We have already witnessed the negative effects of the rising ultra-leftist and nationalistic influences on economic growth. In fact, one of the most important reasons underlying the difficulties experienced by China’s private sector today is the ultra-leftist and nationalistic influence.
AL: You once proposed that Hong Kong should have its own five-year plan. What are five-year plans in the Chinese context, and what exactly would such a plan for Hong Kong entail?
XW: I stepped down as SCMP’s editor-in-chief in 2016 and returned to Beijing to spend more time with my family. I came back to Hong Kong in 2023 to join the HKBU faculty. Until recently, the Hong Kong economy had suffered from the zero-COVID policy and a large exodus of Hong Kong natives. The Hong Kong economy suffered dearly. Therefore, I have been thinking about how Hong Kong should regain its mojo.
One issue that has bothered me over the past two decades is that Hong Kong lacks a long-term development plan. Every year, Hong Kong’s chief executive delivers an annual policy address outlining what Hong Kong can achieve for the upcoming fiscal year. Hong Kong’s economic planning, until this year, has always been myopic and very short-sighted.
When asked what Hong Kong can achieve within a fiscal year, Hong Kong’s chief executive could give you all the numbers and the goals. But if you ask him what Hong Kong would be like five years down the road, he has no idea. Up until this year, their focus spanned a one-year horizon. By comparison, China’s top leaders craft five-year plans and outline what China would be like in terms of industrial capacity, environmental protection, and other areas. China has detailed five-year plans that officials at every level adhere to.
The crux of the issue is that the five-year plan has this ideological connotation, as it was a practice first started in 1953. It was a tool of state planning, copied from the Soviet model. The production of every product was strictly regulated, from automobiles to toothbrushes. Therefore, until today, many see the five-year plan as a distinct symbol of a planned economy, even though the five-year plan in China has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Now, China has changed the official name from “five-year plan” to “five-year guidelines.” Today’s five-year plan is very much driven by market forces, no longer a tool of state planning.
Secondly, zooming out to the world, every country has a long-term plan. They might not call it a “five-year plan,” but every country has a longer-term economic development plan. In fact, every political party has a sort of economic development plan, called a manifesto. When I came back to Hong Kong in 2023, I started to write articles for SCMP and for Chinese-language newspapers, such as the Ming Pao, advocating that Hong Kong should have a long-term plan.
I said that Hong Kong would benefit from a five-year plan, as it can insulate Hong Kong’s economy from fluctuations in political leadership. Normally, a change of chief executive runs the risk of the newcomer easily ignoring or dismissing the plan announced by his predecessor. A five-year plan could help Hong Kong pool its wisdom and focus its energy on crucial developments.
I remember when I first raised this idea at some forums, I was met with strong pushback from some Hong Kong businessmen. They still understood the five-year plan as a product and a tool of state planning. I quipped, “If you don’t like the name five-year plan, call it the four-year plan or six-year plan. I don’t care. You need a long-term plan so that Hong Kong can develop better.”
So I’m very glad to hear that earlier this year, the Hong Kong government decided to institute its own five-year plan. I think it’s a step in the right direction.