By Tom Fowdy
The government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) is undertaking a highly ambitious scheme to develop what is known as the "Northern Metropolis University Town." This area, situated in the New Territories near to the border of China's Mainland, is to be vastly expanded to create three new university-centred districts, known as San Tin, Hung Shui Kiu and Ta Kwu Ling. Each town will incorporate campuses and have its own subject areas of specialisation, spanning from science, technology, medicine, AI, robotics, arts and other things.
In doing so, the Hong Kong chief executive has set out five things which each town seeks to establish, including "education, technology, talents, industries and urban development," and as part of the city's first five-year plan, seeks to build "an international hub for high-calibre talent," in order to consolidate "Hong Kong's position as an international education hub," while seeking to "actively promote the integration of industry and education.
Why has the University town project become so important? First of all, this represents a recalibration of Hong Kong's strategies amidst a changing geopolitical landscape. While Hong Kong has always been a centre of world-class education, boasting some of the continent and the globe's top institutions, it is the conclusion of Hong Kong's leadership that the sector should not exist in isolation. Rather, education itself is increasingly essential to an emerging international climate that has spurred competition between nations over critical technologies, including artificial intelligence, semiconductors and robotics.
The world, as of present, is undergoing another revolution. Whether people like or not, the AI "revolution" is akin to the industrial one, as it will fundamentally change the way humanity lives and its socio-economic organisation, and it is for this precise reason that the United States and China are increasingly engaged in geopolitical competition surrounding it. Over the past few years, the United States has sought to contain China's rise in these critical technologies, largely by seeking to deprive it of critical semiconductors, as well as relevant chipmaking equipment.
This has subsequently made the development and supply of semiconductors a dynamic of this technological race. China's national government, as well as many of its leading companies, are subsequently investing billions to catch up. What we are seeing in China is thus a whole-of-government, whole-of-country effort to develop the necessary technology. However, without education, none of that is happening, and this is where Hong Kong, as a SAR of the country, becomes important, because the city's unique international integration, combined with its record of academic excellence and world-class institutions, offers profound advantages.
Thus, the "Northern Metropolis University Town" development has become a leading political priority. It is for this purpose that the University Town development is strategically located in the New Territories, close to the border with the Chinese Mainland. After all, just across that border is Shenzhen, which is the de facto "technological" capital of China. These favourable geographic conditions allow Hong Kong to orientate its educational resources towards personnel, researchers, companies, and students in the mainland in an extremely accessible way, while also utilising the city's openness to improve connectivity towards the mainland as a whole. This also contributes to the larger goal of developing what is commonly named "the Greater Bay Area," which advocates deeper integration across the entire metropolitan span of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, respectively.
This is not just about geopolitics itself, the financial benefactor for the city, its economic development, and its international importance and status, are huge. In business terms, for those in university institutions, in the city's real estate markets and for the academic job market, amongst many other things, the University town vision represents an extremely profitable and low-risk investment which will turbocharge Hong Kong's economy and inject life into it. In my opinion, economic development is much more complex than simply "making more money than you did last year," as much as that is the end result. Rather, it requires the constant adaptation and reinvention of your game plan to according changing conditions.
Ultimately, what worked in the past may not always work in the present. Hong Kong is an outstanding city with world-class infrastructure and is a global financial centre. However, when the global economy is increasingly being defined by AI and emerging technologies, you have to respond to that, and part of that is doing what China does best: imagining grand-scale infrastructure projects that ultimately reshape the fundamentals of your economic reality. Hong Kong will continue to matter in global finance, but it is increasingly how it matters in education, research, and technology, which will shape the city's development in the decades to come.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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