From Current Digest of the Chinese Press, Feb. 8, 2026. Complete text:
EXPERT OPINION
Editors’ Note. – Professor Linda Chelan Li is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Public and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong, and the founding director of the Research Centre for Sustainable Hong Kong (CSHK, 2017-2026). A scholar of Chinese politics and policy, her research in recent years focuses on Hong Kong’s professional services, cross-border collaboration and sustainable development, particularly in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). She has led major projects including Hong Kong Professional Services in the Co-evolving Belt and Road Initiative and Advancing Professional Development on Economic and Trade Cooperation Zones along Belt and Road, exploring how professional services can act as innovative agents to support regional development and sustainability. Her recent publications include “Four Ideas for Seizing Belt and Road Opportunities for Hong Kong” (CITYUHK CSHK Policy Paper 31, 2024) and the book Hong Kong Professional Services and the Belt and Road Initiative: Challenges for Co-evolving Sustainability (Routledge, 2023). She has also edited the Handbook of Public Finance in China (Edward Elgar, 2026), the first handbook on this subject published in the English language.
* * *
Q. – Your research frames Hong Kong’s professional services as active agents in the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] rather than passive intermediaries. How does this perspective shape our understanding of Hong Kong’s role and comparative advantage in the region?
A. – The emphasis on top-down control in the Chinese political system and culture has led many analysts to interpret active efforts ‘from below’ as passive responses to decisions ‘from above,’ despite established social theories of action and agency that explain the fallacy of dichotomous conceptions. Empirically, the unfolding of past reforms in China has demonstrated that actors on the local levels, in their varying and diverse roles, played an active and constitutive role to social and policy change. This includes the role of Hong Kong in the transformative change in contemporary China from the late 1970s to the present day. My research on the BRI and the role of Hong Kong delves into the complexity of agency between Beijing, Hong Kong and the Belt and Road countries. Essentially, different categories of actors assert their agency through interaction, and our findings detail how some of these interactions have taken place. Regarding Hong Kong’s comparative advantage, our research witnesses how actors from various fronts converged with a heightened expectation of active agency from Hong Kong to contribute to higher levels of openness and creativity in China and the developing economies. Such expectations have criss-crossed with the preexisting structural constraints and political reservations that constitute parts of the total operating environment of Hong Kong, and together they generate the challenges to the nonlinear process of change to which actors in Hong Kong contribute as well as respond.
Q. – Public-private collaboration plays a key role in your research. What role should the Hong Kong government play in enabling professional services to act as agents of sustainable development rather than just service providers?
A. – The core focus of government in professional services development remains, as it should be, one of enhancing and protecting the integrity of professional services. Most professions are self-regulated but there is an ongoing need to be vigilant for collusion and negligence due to inertia and weak external oversight. The mature economies globally have gone through phases of professional development and evolving regulatory frameworks. Enhanced transparency and monitoring by user groups and independent media should be prioritized and given more policy attention. The Hong Kong government should encourage such processes through administrative or legislative review, if necessary, but above all by strengthening a culture of public accountability and equity, and free and independent media. At the same time, the risk of path dependence in the professional services requires the government to adopt an open mindset to review the scope and mode of operation to meet the changing needs of different times and potential new users. In this respect, recent policy developments in green finance and Islamic [Sharia-compliant] finance, and stepped-up ESG [environmental, social and governance] standards and enforcement requirements are examples of pivoting the established sectors to serve better the emerging new demands of sustainability.
Q. – Cross-border collaboration often brings both opportunities and challenges. From your research, what are the main governance and coordination issues Hong Kong must address when engaging with Belt and Road and GBA partners?
A. – The Hong Kong Government has stepped up engagements with BRI and GBA partners in recent years with an explicit focus on economic development and technological innovations and applications. Notwithstanding the benefits of additional investment or trade, the core objective is essentially to extend the capacity for innovations and creativity in Hong Kong, the rest of China and the [other] Belt and Road countries. The key deliverable is the openness and innovation capacity Hong Kong offers. Here it is important to understand that this openness and innovation capacity will not be restricted to the economic and technological domains, but also contingent upon policies and developments in broader areas including education, politics and social wellbeing. In other words, gains and setbacks in domestic governance matter. Hong Kong needs to be vigilant to maintaining and further developing its high standards in these regards in order to stay competitive in BRI and GBA collaborations.
Q. – Professional domains like finance, legal, and consulting services are often mature sectors. What kinds of institutional or organizational innovations are needed for these sectors to fully support sustainable BRI projects?
A. – Mature as they are, professional services have often developed a path dependence – i.e., ‘fixations’ into a specific pattern of markets, users and service types – resulting in “trained incapacity” or “blind spots” in service and capacity. Since many BRI projects are in developing economies along the weaker links of global supply chains, they often fall outside the traditional focus of services in the finance, legal and consulting sectors. To bridge these gaps, changes will be necessary to the multiple nodes of the professional services supply chain: new training and qualifications for the service providers, reforms in governance structure and inclusion of new decision-makers, new service products to meet the demands of the new markets and users, and modifications of regulatory ground rules.
Q. – Are there any concrete examples – either from Hong Kong or comparable international hubs – that illustrate how such innovations can be implemented in practice?
A. – Let me cite an example from Hong Kong in legal services. A policy paper our research team published in 2018, “Strengthening Hong Kong’s Position as an Arbitration Hub in the Belt and Road Initiative” (CITYUHK CSHK Policy Paper 8, 2018), puts forward recommendations on training, promotion and institutional innovations, in order to enhance Hong Kong’s role in arbitration and mediation for BRI- related disputes. These include expanding university education programs provided in Hong Kong universities to cover BRI legal jurisdictions, attracting arbitration institutions and legal practices from BRI jurisdictions to establish branch offices and services in Hong Kong, providing necessary infrastructural facilities such as space, and strengthening the promotion of the advantages of Hong Kong’s established legal and dispute resolution capacity to Beijing and overseas jurisdictions to ensure optimal investment and utilization. Discussions and preparations for reforms followed in the next several years. In May 2025, the International Organization for Mediation (IOMed) – the world’s first intergovernmental mediation body – was established with headquarters in Hong Kong, following the signature of a convention by over 30 countries. IOMed promotes mediation for international disputes (including commercial and investment ones under BRI frameworks) through voluntary, non-binding processes emphasizing dialogue and mutual respect. It positions Hong Kong as a global mediation hub where BRI partner countries can resolve disputes peacefully. Given the accumulation of case experience, the initiative will benefit the expansion of cross-border technological collaboration and sustainability projects.
Q. – How can deeper integration within the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area [GBA] enhance Hong Kong’s capacity to serve BRI economies effectively?
A. – The key is reform, and reform toward a higher degree of openness and creativity. As I argue in my works, we should understand the GBA as a policy rather than as a geographical region only. Geographically, the GBA consists of nine cities in Guangdong Province, plus the special administration regions of Hong Kong and Macao. Whilst the GBA blueprint document released in February 2019 includes contents on the development of these 11 sites into a “world-class hub” of business and innovation, the important part is how to achieve such an aspiration. My research maintains that this question can only be answered by seeing the GBA as a mechanism of reform. The core capital of Hong Kong in this mechanism lies in its openness and distinct institutions that attract international elements and trigger institutional changes through collaborations. This conception of “GBA as a mechanism of reform” was shared with the central government’s drafting team that visited Hong Kong in 2017. After a few years of interruption due to COVID and the social protests in Hong Kong in mid-late 2019, various measures have stepped up cross-border exchanges and collaborations between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. These include, amongst others, the prioritizing of the Northern Metropolitan Area neighboring Shenzhen on the part of Hong Kong, the rapid launch of the Shenzhen part of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technological Park, and initiatives to enhance talent flow in education and in work and cross-border flow of data. Going forward, attention needs to focus on fostering additional space for creativity, so that the cross-border collaboration will generate a larger capacity for Hong Kong as part of the GBA to serve as a world hub of business and innovation and to contribute to the BRI economies. Making an impact requires vigilant monitoring to minimize distraction and drifting, and to ensure the collaborations remain geared to the core objectives.
Q. – Sustainability is increasingly central to international projects. How can Hong Kong’s professional services integrate environmental, social, and governance considerations while remaining commercially viable?
A. – Commercial viability is a constituent factor to sustainability, rather than a separate element. The notion of sustainability demands lateral thinking and the recognition of dynamic equilibrium over time. For example, how much does a project need to earn to be considered as commercially viable? How long should one wait to see returns to define an investment cycle? What should be the relative share of returns between different groups involved in a project, and how to delineate who should be excluded? It is clear that ethical, political, social, economic and ecological considerations are integral to such questions. Active agency is essential to the search for an answer that fits a specific time and space, and the quality of the agency differentiates the outcome. The professional services sector has an added responsibility in the search for dynamic equilibrium, as the values that relate to sustainability are part and parcel of what defines a profession. In this regard, the sustainability services sector in Hong Kong has steadily grown in recent years. As a global value and a real-life issue, sustainability will continue to rank high on the agenda of all countries and cities in the world. Continual efforts in extending openness to the world will contribute to Hong Kong’s search for a better equilibrium of sustainability to fit changing contexts.
Q. – Looking ahead, how do you envision Hong Kong adapting its strategy for professional services to remain relevant amid evolving geopolitical and economic conditions?
A. – Rule of law and openness are key institutional features and traditional strengths in Hong Kong society, and there is a high degree of consensus in government and society regarding the need to maintain these features. That said, Hong Kong has been facing acute challenges to these key features and there have been various tensions around the implementation of the “one country, two systems” principle. The investigation into active agency in my research identifies the key role of agency and the cycles of interactive agency amongst the diverse actors. As we know, all actors – whether in Hong Kong, in the rest of China or [elsewhere] in the BRI, and whether in government, business or society – agree to the importance of the values of rule of law and openness to Hong Kong and to them. In the light of heightening geopolitical tensions and volatile economic conditions, Hong Kong’s professional services should redouble their efforts to sustain and extend these core values. The governments in Hong Kong and Beijing need to fully support such efforts and allow professional integrity to come first amidst geopolitical and economic volatility.