By Frank Chen
This year marks the twenty-ninth anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The question before us is not simply what opportunities and challenges the city now faces, but how we should understand, from a broader perspective, the story of a small territory that became a global city; of a harbour that became a global financial hub; and of a society whose resilience has repeatedly exceeded the expectations of those who predicted its decline.
The more important question is whether Hong Kong still matters — to China, to Asia, and to the wider world. The answer, despite repeated predictions of decline, remains yes.
Hong Kong's significance has never rested merely on its skyline, its harbour, or its financial markets, though all three have helped define its global image. Its deeper importance lies in a rarer quality that is increasingly valuable in the current world: Hong Kong has long possessed the ability to make different worlds intelligible to one another. It has translated between Chinese and international capitalism, between common-law institutions and commercial dynamism, and between local culture and global mobility. In a world increasingly marked by suspicion, fragmentation and strategic rivalry, that capacity is not only a historical inheritance but also a strategic asset.
The twenty-ninth anniversary of the SAR should therefore be understood not only as a date of commemoration, but also as a moment of reflection. Hong Kong's first few decades after its return to China have not been years of stillness. They have included financial turbulence, public health crises, political storms, technological disruption and geopolitical pressure. Yet the striking feature of Hong Kong's post-1997 history is not the absence of difficulty. It is the city's repeated capacity to overcome difficulty without surrendering its essential role. This achievement would not have been possible without the support of the Central Government, the work of the governing team, the participation of social groups, and the efforts of Hong Kong's citizens.
In international relations, hard power is often measured by territory, military strength or demographic weight. Cities, however, exercise a different kind of power: they organise flows of capital, law, talent, information, trust and reputation. By that measure, Hong Kong remains one of Asia's most consequential cities. It is not a conventional great power, but it is a great connector. Its role is not to dominate a region, but to link regions together.
This is why Hong Kong's future cannot be understood through nostalgia alone. Nostalgia may warm the heart with memories of the good old days, but it cannot build strategy for the future. The Hong Kong of the coming decades will not succeed by attempting to reproduce the conditions of the late twentieth century; the domestic and international environments are no longer the same. Globalisation is more contested, supply chains are more political, finance is more regulated, technology is more strategic, and great-power competition has returned to the centre of world affairs. Hong Kong's task is not to deny this new reality, but to navigate its place within it.
Its new place is clear: Hong Kong must remain the city where China's national development and the world's international systems continue to meet.
This is not a modest role. It requires institutional confidence, policy imagination and cultural self-belief. On one hand, Hong Kong's value to China lies precisely in the fact that it is not identical to other mainland cities legally, politically, socially and culturally. On the other hand, its value to the world lies precisely in the fact that it is not detached from China. The city's uniqueness and strength come from this duality. It is both inside and outside, both national and international, both historically Chinese and deeply global. Many places attempt to be bridges; Hong Kong has lived and functioned as an indispensable one.
The temptation, in politically charged times, is to treat duality as contradiction. But in Hong Kong's case, duality should be embraced, because it has always been a source of vitality. Its legal system, financial infrastructure, professional services, world-class universities, civil society traditions, Cantonese spirit and international sensibility have produced a civic personality that is difficult to imitate. Other cities may be larger, some may be faster-growing, a few may compete in finance, technology or logistics. But very few possess Hong Kong's accumulated density of international trust, Chinese access and urban sophistication.
The first twenty-nine years of the SAR have also shown that "one country, two systems" is not merely a static slogan, but a living constitutional and political arrangement with an innovative governance philosophy. Like all such arrangements, it has had to operate under pressure. Its success depends not on avoiding adjustment, but on preserving purpose. That purpose is to ensure that Hong Kong contributes to the country while retaining the distinctive systems and capacities that make such contribution meaningful.
For this reason, Hong Kong should resist two unhealthy narratives. The first is the narrative of being doomed to fail, often repeated by those who confuse political preference with structural analysis. The second is the narrative of effortless success through the help of mainland development, which assumes that historical advantage or mainland support will automatically renew Hong Kong's role. Both are unhelpful. Hong Kong is neither finished nor guaranteed, it stands at a demanding point of transition.
The next chapter, as Hong Kong approaches the thirtieth anniversary of the SAR, must be more ambitious than recovery. Recovery suggests a return to what existed before. Hong Kong should aim higher: reinvention with continuity.
Undoubtedly, finance will remain central. Hong Kong's capital markets, banking system, asset management industry and offshore RMB functions are core components of the city's regional and international role. Yet finance alone is no longer enough. A great city in the twenty-first century must also generate ideas, technologies, cultural influence and policy imagination. Hong Kong must be not only a marketplace, but also a place that gathers great minds.
This means strengthening its universities, research institutions and innovation ecosystem. It means giving young people reasons not merely to remain in Hong Kong, but to believe in it. It means turning the Greater Bay Area from an administrative concept into a lived geography of opportunity. It means ensuring that Hong Kong's professional excellence in law, finance, medicine, education, architecture, logistics and public administration becomes a platform for regional leadership.
Hong Kong's cultural role is equally important. The city has never been just an economic machine; it has also been a cultural hub for southern China and East Asia. Its films, music, literature, food, language and urban humour have carried a distinctive sensibility across Asia and beyond. That cultural personality should not be treated as secondary to finance. Culture is how a city explains itself to the world. A Hong Kong that speaks with cultural confidence will be more persuasive, more attractive, and more human.
Nor should Hong Kong underestimate its diplomatic and geopolitical significance. In a world where China is often discussed in simplified and polarised terms, Hong Kong can still serve as a place of nuance. It can help the world understand China beyond caricature and help China engage the world beyond suspicion. This does not mean avoiding hard questions, it means cultivating the intellectual maturity to address them without hysteria. The best bridges are not passive structures, they must be maintained, defended, and used.
As the SAR approaches its thirtieth year, Hong Kong should look ahead with neither complacency nor anxiety. Its history offers a lesson in disciplined confidence. This city was built by migrants, workers, entrepreneurs, educators, civil servants, artists and professionals who understood that constraint could become energy. It turned scarcity into efficiency, uncertainty into enterprise, and locality into global relevance. That spirit remains Hong Kong's most precious resource.
The next thirty years will be more complex and less foreseeable than the last thirty. They will be shaped by fast-evolving artificial intelligence, climate transition, power rebalancing, regional integration, demographic change and intensifying geopolitical competition. These forces do not make Hong Kong irrelevant; they make Hong Kong's function more unique and necessary. The more divided the world becomes, the more valuable credible connectors become. The more complex China's relationship with the world becomes, the more important Hong Kong's interpretive role becomes.
The first twenty-nine years of the SAR have been a demanding beginning. The coming years can be a more confident chapter. Hong Kong does not need to prove that it is unchanged, no living city is unchanged. It needs to prove something more important: that change can deepen rather than diminish its role.
That is the art of remaining indispensable. Few cities in the world have practised it with more discipline, resilience and clarity of purpose than Hong Kong.
Frank Chen is a PhD student in Public Policy and Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on international relations and China. He holds an MPhil from CUHK and a BSocSc(Hons) from HKBU.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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