June 4, 2026 · 《HKFEI》
The previous article argued that “planning is not consultation” — a qualified Five-Year Plan requires policy research work shared among the government, universities, and independent think tanks; yet Hong Kong is thin in all three.
Where does this gap come from? Why must it be filled today? How can it be built? This article will start from Hong Kong’s own history and answer each in turn.
1. The Colonial Era: A City That Did Not Need to Plan for Itself
During the 156 years of British rule, Hong Kong never had to do its own long-term planning.
As a British colony, Hong Kong’s highest authority was the Governor appointed by the Crown, answerable to the Colonial Office in London. Major strategic questions — including currency arrangements, defence, diplomacy, constitutional design, and the direction of macroeconomic policy — all had their final decision-making power outside Hong Kong.
The colonial administration was itself extremely small. In 1941, on the eve of the Second World War, the entire government’s Administrative Officer cadre numbered only 35 people. Even when the colonial government expanded substantially in the 1970s, the senior civil service system remained a lean executive team — its role was to maintain operations and mediate conflicts, not to do independent planning for the city. The famous “positive non-intervention” governing philosophy carried the implicit assumption that the government did not need to set a long-term direction for the market, and naturally did not need to build the accompanying policy research capacity.
Colonial-era university education was also not originally designed to cultivate local policy thinking. The University of Hong Kong, established in 1911, had among its missions that of cultivating English-speaking elites for the Southeast Asian region within the British Empire. Before the 1990s, research centres within universities focusing on local public policy were rare; independently established policy research institutions at the level of civil society were almost entirely absent.
2. The Transition and the Twenty Years Since the Handover: Awareness Dawns, but Capacity Falls Short
A turning point came after the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The commitments to “One Country, Two Systems” and “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” meant that after 1997, Hong Kong would need to manage its own affairs.
In 1989, Governor David Wilson established the Central Policy Unit (CPU), the closest thing to a policy think tank in the colonial era. At the end of 1990, after the Basic Law drafting was completed, the “One Country, Two Systems Research Centre” was set up on the basis of the secretariat of the original Basic Law Consultative Committee, with Mr An Tze-kai (Albert An) (1910–2000) as its first Council Chairman. After the 1997 handover, the Tung Chee-hwa government retained and expanded the Central Policy Unit, with figures of different backgrounds such as Mr Lau Siu-kai and Mr Shiu Sin-por successively serving as its chief advisers.
At the level of civil society, local policy research institutions also emerged in succession, including Civic Exchange (2000), the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre (2006), Our Hong Kong Foundation (2014), and MWYO (2015). On the surface, the numbers were growing — in 2015, Hong Kong had 30 think tanks, the third-highest density in Asia by population ratio — but none made it onto global or regional top-tier rankings.
Behind the numbers are two deeper issues.
On quality, local think tanks commonly suffer from insufficient resources, thin research teams, and inadequate methodological training.
On sustainability, the vast majority depend on a single patron; when the patron’s political cycle ends, business priorities shift, or personal interests change, the institution contracts or even closes — the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre wound up in 2022; MWYO ceased operations in 2024.
In the first two decades or so after the handover, Hong Kong had developed the awareness of “doing policy research”, but had not yet built the institutional arrangement for “sustaining policy research”. Each institution resembled a team assembled on the fly, set up to meet the needs of a particular political figure and disbanded as that figure’s influence waned.
3. Today’s Concrete Shape: Government, Universities, and Think Tanks Are All Thin
The colonial-era lack of need, combined with the inadequate construction during the transition period, has compounded into today’s situation.
The government side. The Chief Executive’s Policy Unit (CEPU) is the core unit that currently coordinates long-term policy research. A check of the government directory shows that positions currently titled “Research Officer”, “Senior Researcher”, “Researcher”, and “Assistant Researcher” number only around ten people in total, spread across three policy research groups — local, mainland, and international. The rest of the establishment focuses on Policy Address coordination, the Chief Executive’s Council of Advisers secretariat, funding-programme management, and press and administrative support. The policy research units within each policy bureau mainly support immediate governance and replies to LegCo questions, not structural research that crosses bureaus or terms.
The university side. Hong Kong’s top universities have undergone one of the most rapid waves of internationalisation in Asia. About 74% of the professoriate at HKU are non-local scholars; at HKUST, the figure is 76.2%. International rankings such as QS and THE explicitly reward the proportion of international faculty and the proportion of internationally co-authored papers. Universities aim to climb the international rankings — which in many senses is an achievement.
But the cost follows: scholars’ promotion opportunities depend on whether they can publish in top international academic journals, and topic selection must capture the interest of international peers. A rigorous empirical study of public housing allocation in Sham Shui Po, or of the fiscal financing of the Northern Metropolis, may be of great value to Hong Kong policymaking yet struggles to pass the peer review of top international journals. This is no one’s fault; it is a rational response to institutional incentives. But the result is clear: the share of research that genuinely targets local policy issues and delivers on policymakers’ schedules is negligible.
The think-tank side — the middle layer that should fill the gap — is precisely the weakest.
To be fair, the Chief Executive’s Policy Unit has recognised this gap. Since its restructuring at the end of 2022, CEPU has actively expanded the eligibility of its two main funding programmes — the Public Policy Research Funding Scheme (PPRFS) and the Strategic Public Policy Research Funding Scheme (SPPRFS) — to list civil-society think tanks alongside universities as eligible applicants. The themes of the 2026/27 SPPRFS also clearly revolve around the national 15th Five-Year Plan.
The direction is right. But the scale falls short: the two schemes together have an annual allocation of about HK$30 million, of which the strategic, long-term SPPRFS received 37 applications in 2024/25 and ultimately funded only two projects, totalling about HK$7 million. Against the 2024/25 total government expenditure of HK$753.2 billion, the entire pool of competitive public resources used to cultivate local think tanks accounts for only about 0.004% of public expenditure — roughly one twenty-five-thousandth.
This scale is suited to funding piecemeal project research, but cannot support the sustained organisational entrepreneurship of policy research — letting a research team follow a single issue over the long term, accumulate knowledge across government terms, and build local analytical capacity sufficient to sit at the table with international consultancy firms.
4. Hong Kong Must Continuously Build Local Policy Research Capacity
Reason one: autonomy itself requires a set of capacities for independent thinking.
“Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” and “a high degree of autonomy” are not only political commitments but also a demand for capacity. A polity authorised to govern itself must possess the talent, knowledge, and institutions needed to shoulder that autonomy. If major policy thinking depends entirely on outside sources, the autonomy retains only its administrative-execution component and loses its strategic-thinking component.
This neither matches the design intent of “One Country, Two Systems” nor the central authorities’ expectation of Hong Kong as one of the “eight centres” — a city positioned as an international financial, innovation and technology, trade, shipping, legal, and cultural centre should have the capacity for independent, in-depth judgement on its own development direction.
Reason two: Hong Kong’s role as a “special node” in national strategy itself requires a mature local policy research sector.
Hong Kong’s place in the overall national development picture is not simply that of “a city that implements higher-level directives”, but rather a node with special functions — interfacing with international markets, testing new institutional arrangements, cultivating cross-boundary talent, and conducting financial and legal experimentation. The core value of this role lies precisely in Hong Kong’s ability to do two-way “translation” in a language that understands national strategy yet is also familiar with international standards.
But this translation capacity does not form on its own; it needs to be supported over the long term by a solid local policy research sector. Take RMB internationalisation as an example: if it can only be handled by mainland think tanks, the perspective of international financial markets is missing; if it is only led by international investment banks, the deep understanding of national policy intent is missing. The financing design of the Northern Metropolis, the institutional arrangements for cross-boundary data flows, and the coordination of the innovation-and-technology industry with the Greater Bay Area all face the same problem: one must understand the national direction while also grasping Hong Kong’s institutions, international rules, and market context. This is precisely the most irreplaceable function of local policy research institutions.
Importantly, none of these distinctive features can be directly inherited from the British Hong Kong era. Each one requires sustained institutional thinking, discursive construction, and long-term maintenance. Without a local policy research community taking on this work, Hong Kong’s distinctiveness will quietly slip away — not because it is weakened by outside forces, but because the internal capacity to understand and articulate it is lost.
In the final analysis, whether it is the need for autonomy or Hong Kong’s role as a special node in the national system, both point to the same conclusion: local policy research capacity, for Hong Kong today, is not the icing on the cake but the infrastructure.
5. Building Policy Research Infrastructure: A Few Concrete Tasks
Building this capacity on the scale of infrastructure requires at least three concurrent efforts.
First, redesign the scale and structure of public funding. The current competitive public resources used to cultivate local think tanks account for an extremely small share of total SAR government expenditure, just 0.004%. This scale, combined with a project-based funding model, is only enough to support piecemeal research, but cannot support systematic knowledge accumulation — the “ad-hoc assembly” model of local think tanks over the past two decades or more is rooted precisely in this. A truly meaningful funding reform must contain at least two directions: on scale, raise the investment by an order of magnitude (e.g. to a 0.05% level, about HK$375 million), with the absolute amount still modest in the context of public expenditure; on structure, introduce competitive multi-year core operating grants (e.g. three to five years) to provide stable support for local policy research institutions that pass quality review. Funding must be accompanied by clear standards: methodological transparency, public release of research outputs, disclosure of conflicts of interest, and regular peer review. The stricter the standards, the more firmly the public character of the funding stands.
Second, open the existing commissioning pipelines for outsourced research. The SAR government and the major public and private funding bodies each year commission large amounts of evaluation studies, social impact assessments, feasibility studies, and consultancy reports, often involving resources in the hundreds of millions. But the vast majority of these contracts flow to two types of institutions: universities, or international consultancy firms. Legislative Council member Chow Man-kong pointed out this structural problem as early as July 2023 in a written question: the government “invests substantial resources in consultancy research reports for individual public works projects” but “provides very limited support for the development of the think-tank community”. If the procurement mechanism is opened in a structured way to qualified local non-profit policy research institutions, local think tanks will be able to retain experienced analysts across years, accumulating the institutional knowledge that one-off tenders can never produce. This part requires no new public funds — the pipelines already exist.
Third, build a talent pipeline for local policy research. Policy researchers do not appear automatically. It requires postgraduate training in applied policy research, postdoctoral fellowship programmes, space for university academics to participate in policy research through sabbaticals and secondments, and opportunities for cross-sector talent flow between government, universities, and think tanks. Without a stable talent pipeline, the resources from the first two efforts will ultimately fall into the predicament of being unable to be absorbed.
Taken together, the three efforts will allow the local policy research sector to gradually move from a state of “teams assembled on the fly” to a third pillar that can span government terms, accumulate knowledge, and sit at the table with the government and universities. Building this capacity is the undertaking that Hong Kong must begin now as “One Country, Two Systems” enters a new stage.
(Translation supported by AI)
