February 26, 2026 · 《Ming Pao》
For a long time, the SAR government’s policy direction has centred on each year’s Policy Address. Although the government does have some long-term plans, most of them are drawn up and pushed forward separately by the responsible bureaux, making it hard to form an integrated, strategic blueprint for long-term development.
Chief Executive John Lee has said that Hong Kong will, for the first time, draw up its own Five-Year Plan, and will proactively align itself in full with the national “15th Five-Year” Plan. This is a governance mindset shift worth taking seriously: the SAR government will no longer rely solely on year-by-year policy to respond to the problems of the day, but will try to use medium-term planning to take the initiative in marshalling resources, coordinating policy directions, and closing the blind spots of the free market in long-term infrastructure, technological innovation, and improving people’s livelihoods.
Planning That Actually Works
Practice is the highest standard for testing theory. We need not fetishise the all-powerful market, but that does not mean planning is necessarily useful either. Take the Kai Tak land-use and cruise terminal development scheme, for example. Planning began in 1991 — more than 34 years ago now — and the project has gone through years of discussion and several rounds of revised plans. During that time, more than 300 hectares of precious Kai Tak land lay “sunbathing” for as long as ten years. The cruise terminal was eventually built after long public clamour, but its utilisation rate has fallen well short of expectations, and it is widely regarded in the community as a “dead venue” or a “white elephant.” As for the more recently planned Smart and Green Mass Transit System in East Kowloon, scheduled to open in 2031, whether it can resolve the cruise terminal’s “isolated island” predicament still has to be tested in practice.
The above examples show that planning that actually works has to meet several conditions: a clear grasp of future trends in the economy, society, and technology; broad consultation with different stakeholders; accurate identification of one’s own strengths and weaknesses; the design of effective ways to overcome those weaknesses; repeated deliberation to test whether the plan fits objective reality; the building of social consensus and a shared vision; and the establishment of effective mechanisms for execution, monitoring, error-correction, and revision.
The country has been running Five-Year Plans since 1953 — nearly 80 years now — going through the early command-style central planned economy and the transition to a market economy since reform and opening up in 1979. The function and positioning of the Five-Year Plan has been repeatedly adjusted along the way. From the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) onwards, the term was changed from “Plan” (計劃) to “Plan” (規劃) in the sense of a blueprint, reflecting that its nature has shifted from a command-style plan to a blueprint guiding the development of the overall economy and society.
The country’s nearly 80 years of planning have accumulated much valuable experience that Hong Kong can draw on. Yet under “One Country, Two Systems,” Hong Kong’s objective conditions differ markedly from those of the mainland, and copying mainland experience wholesale is liable to produce the problems of not fitting local conditions, working behind closed doors, or mere “Dong Shi imitating Xi Shi” — that is, forced imitation that misses the point. Drawing on Hong Kong’s past socio-economic characteristics and the country’s experience of running Five-Year Plans, this article explores how Hong Kong can build a fitting and useful “Hong Kong-style Five-Year Plan,” and further analyses why building a more mature and open public policy discussion space matters for the “Hong Kong-style Five-Year Plan.”
A Distinctive Feature of Hong Kong’s Economy: The Government Owns and Decides on Land Use
Both internationally and in Hong Kong itself, many commentators have long regarded the Hong Kong economy as a typical case of laissez-faire or “positive non-interventionism,” overlooking the fact that almost all of our land is publicly owned. In Hong Kong, where “the five elements lack earth” (i.e. land is in short supply), land is the scarcest and most precious resource, and whether it comes to supply, use rights, or land prices, these have always been led by the government rather than the market.
Hong Kong has always used land planning as a tool to advance social and economic policy. Since the early colonial era, the government has consistently granted land with specific covenants or designated uses to support public housing, social welfare organisations, and community facilities; it has also used concessionary land prices to support industrial and infrastructure needs, such as railways, logistics, and the port. Hong Kong’s development has therefore never been divorced from the government’s conscious planning and guidance.
Our social services and public housing system are themselves the product of long-term planning. Since long-term planning for social services and public housing began in the MacLehose era, nearly half of Hong Kong’s population has lived in public housing — and that, of course, has not been led by the market, but is the result of the government’s long-term investment and sustained planning.
As for the “positive non-interventionism” trumpeted in the Haddon-Cave era, this was really mainly a political principle by which the government avoided giving special treatment to particular interest groups; it has never meant that the government refrained from intervening in social services, public housing, or major development directions. Today’s discussion of a Five-Year Plan in Hong Kong is not about abandoning the market, but about building a clearer medium-term policy framework on top of the market, so that government action can be more effective and more directed.
Valuable Experience from the Country’s Five-Year Planning
The country’s planning process is highly rigorous, drawing on extensive “whole-of-government, whole-of-society, all-round” participation, and the experience is worth Hong Kong’s reference. Take the 14th Five-Year Plan as an example: it was published in March 2021, with a full text of 19 chapters and about 75,000 characters. The specific drafting process was carried out in three steps.
The first step is preliminary research and problem assessment. Before formal drafting began, research work had been under way since early 2019, mobilising the central government, local governments, and nearly a hundred universities and think tanks. Building on the assessment of the 13th Five-Year Plan, they produced around 300 research reports on more than 200 major topics, which together formed the basic thinking of the 14th Five-Year Plan. The second step is building the framework. In mid-2020, the National Development and Reform Commission carried out a summary assessment of the 13th Five-Year Plan, and together with local government proposals, formed the concrete framework. The third step is drafting, consultation, and approval. In October 2020, the plenary session of the Central Committee produced the recommendations draft for the 14th Five-Year Plan; the State Council then led the drafting of the outline draft and carried out public consultation; and in March 2021, the plan was finally approved by the National People’s Congress.
Drawing on the country’s valuable experience of drawing up Five-Year Plans, Hong Kong’s Five-Year Plan should likewise be built on a solid research foundation, and fully incorporate the views of stakeholders and think tanks.
The Role of Different Sectors of Society and Think Tanks
Hong Kong is not without long-term planning. In recent years the government has put forward medium- to long-term directions in a number of important areas — the Northern Metropolis development, the land and housing strategy (such as “Hong Kong 2030+”), the international education hub, and so on — reflecting that Hong Kong already has a certain foundation in spatial planning, industrial layout, and livelihood development.
But most of these plans are scattered across different policy areas and bureaux, and the linkages between them, the prioritisation, the allocation of resources, and the overall goals still need to be strengthened. For example, Hong Kong has in recent years been facing trends such as population mobility, population ageing, and changes in family structure; yet current policy still tends to remain at the level of single issues handled by individual bureaux (such as attracting talent), and less often takes a systems-engineering, all-round view to plan housing, education, healthcare, the labour market, and social welfare policy for the long term, on the basis of an overall socio-economic blueprint and the future population structure.
The country’s Five-Year Plan places great emphasis on drawing on collective wisdom, and this experience is particularly worth borrowing. In the process of drawing up Hong Kong’s first Five-Year Plan, different sectors of society and think tanks can share the government’s workload. The authorities need to invite university scholars, professional bodies, the business community, think tanks, and others to participate — first, by focusing on problem diagnosis and data analysis to clarify Hong Kong’s structural problems and challenges; then, by designing a blueprint and putting forward grounded plans and indicators; and finally, by setting up public consultation and a public review mechanism to assess the plan’s progress regularly.
In recent years Hong Kong has seen a “think-tank winter”: many think tanks have run into financial difficulties because of the economic downturn and tycoons “turning off the tap,” and some well-known ones have closed down. Moreover, in an increasingly sensitive political environment, sharper commentary may also face accusations of so-called “stirring up conflict” or “harbouring ulterior motives,” and the volume of think-tank activity and research has clearly shrunk. Under this “think-tank winter,” how to improve Hong Kong’s think-tank ecosystem is a question that cannot be avoided when drawing up a Five-Year Plan. Without think tanks that have sustained research capacity and can connect policy with different sectors, the government will easily run into problems such as insufficient research support and difficulty in evaluating outcomes when it pushes forward medium- and long-term planning. To improve this ecosystem, beyond increasing resources, it is even more important to set up cooperation mechanisms — for example, having the government commission more systematic thematic research in the early stages of planning, encouraging universities and civil-society think tanks to collaborate, and improving the openness of research data. In the long run, what Hong Kong needs is not scattered policy commentary, but a think-tank ecosystem that can continuously train policy talent and promote cross-sectoral dialogue, providing the government and society with more solid public policy support.
The Key to the Five-Year Plan: Building a New Approach to Governance
The real significance of a Hong Kong-style Five-Year Plan does not lie in formally imitating the mainland, nor in adding a new medium-term policy document; it lies in whether Hong Kong can, through this, build a more mature approach to governance: from having the annual Policy Address lead the way, to medium-term planning coordinating the whole; from each bureau advancing separately, to cross-bureau collaboration as a whole; from policy responding to problems, to using research and data to anticipate problems proactively.
If this “maiden voyage” is to succeed, at least three things must be done. First, planning must be grounded in data and empirical research — only by truly understanding the problems can we plan for the long term. Second, existing plans and bureaux must be integrated through a systems-engineering perspective, sorting out, supplementing, or revising them on the existing basis. Third, a trackable roadmap and indicators must be set out; without a timetable, division of responsibilities, and a public review mechanism, even the best vision will struggle to land.
For Hong Kong, a Five-Year Plan is not about abandoning the market economy, but about giving the government greater capacity to plan for the long term on top of the market, and creating a more directed, more mature, and more open public policy discussion space. If the first “Hong Kong-style Five-Year Plan” can be grounded in sufficient research, open discussion, and cross-sector collaboration, Hong Kong will have an opportunity through this to break out of the predicament of policy fragmentation, and to build a more stable and forward-looking governance framework for its future development.
(Translation supported by AI)
