May 28, 2026 · 《Ming Pao》
Hong Kong is drafting its first ‘Five-Year Plan’ — the first attempt to draw up a comprehensive long-term plan for itself. Over recent months, the Legislative Council’s ‘Subcommittee on Aligning with the National 15th Five-Year Plan’ has held around 90 industry consultations, engaged more than 4,000 participants, and collected over 400 written submissions. The workload is substantial, and it reflects the many views and expectations that different sectors of society hold about Hong Kong’s future development.
But before debating whether the consultation was well run, or whether the report is properly written, perhaps we should pause and return to a more fundamental question: what exactly is ‘planning’?
1. ‘The Plan Itself Is Worthless’
Former US President Eisenhower commanded millions of troops during World War II. He is often quoted as saying: ‘The plan itself is worthless, but the process of planning is everything’ — in a world that changes by the minute, even the best-written plan becomes obsolete; only the planning process cultivates the precious capacity for forward thinking and dynamic adjustment. Plans are dead; planning capacity is alive.
The Chinese articulated this principle even earlier, and more directly. In May 1930, Mao Zedong spent more than ten consecutive days in Xunwu County, Jiangxi, holding investigation meetings and interviewing merchants, farmers, and cadres, conducting a large-scale social survey. From this fieldwork, he produced an essay titled ‘Oppose Book Worship’, in which he set out the principle that has since become one of the most-quoted lines in Chinese politics: ‘No investigation, no right to speak.’
For precisely this reason, mature polities around the world — from Singapore’s ‘Committee on the Future Economy’ to the UK’s ‘Modern Industrial Strategy’ to the long-term policy research units of OECD member countries — are willing to invest heavily in planning work, committing professional teams and long-term resources, not to produce a glossy plan document but to build a capacity that can continuously absorb information, revise judgments, and adjust direction.
In April this year, Xia Baolong, Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, made clear that the SAR government’s formulation of its first Five-Year Plan is ‘highly significant’: the plan should be ‘scientific and forward-looking’ and should ‘draw on the collective wisdom’ of the community in its drafting and implementation. This indicates that the Five-Year Plan is not merely a piece of alignment work but a core task that expects Hong Kong to take the initiative in thinking about its own future, to coordinate across departments, and to take responsibility across political terms.
To do this work well, enthusiasm alone is not enough — it requires manpower, time, and professional training, as well as institutions capable of sustaining the work over the long term.
2. The Test Hong Kong Now Faces
Hong Kong has only just begun to enter this work. During the 156 years of British rule, major strategic thinking was conducted mainly in London; after the handover, the commitments of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ and ‘Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong’ mean that Hong Kong must manage its own affairs, but the institutional infrastructure for long-term planning was never truly built.
Procedurally speaking, the LegCo consultation has broad coverage and legislators have invested significant effort. But according to a recent report in the Hong Kong Economic Journal, several legislators who chaired consultation sessions privately acknowledged that the proceedings were not ideal: many industry representatives had no grasp of the basic concept of a ‘Five-Year Plan’ and tended to treat the consultation as a ‘grievance session’ — businesses demanded subsidies, the education sector lobbied for funding. A veteran pro-establishment legislator privately confessed: ‘I’m still figuring out myself what a five-year plan is — how could the industry be expected to understand it?’
This is not a problem of any individual legislator or sector. When industry representatives face a government consultation, it is entirely reasonable for them to voice their most pressing needs. To expect them to judge for themselves which demands belong in a five-year plan and which belong in the next Budget is itself an unreasonable expectation. Legislators chairing consultations, gathering views, and compiling reports are simply doing their duty.
3. Population as an Example: Four Levels of Issues
So, if we are serious, what kinds of questions must a ‘Five-Year Plan’ answer? Take population policy as an example — at a minimum, it must provide answers on four levels:
Goals: Should Hong Kong’s population be maintained at 7.6 million over the next 20 years, or allowed to decline naturally to around 6 million? What economic structure, labour market, and fiscal sustainability does each path imply? Under the positioning of the ‘Eight Centres’, what scale and skill composition of workforce does Hong Kong need?
Balancing of interests: Will a large influx of young professional talent suppress local workers’ bargaining power? What compensation mechanism should be used to balance that cost? Raising the retirement age affects physical labourers and professionals asymmetrically — should the policy be one-size-fits-all, or differentiated by tier?
Methods: Should ‘talent importation’ rely mainly on individual points-based systems or industry quotas? Should fiscal spending to encourage births be channelled mainly through tax breaks, housing priority, or direct subsidies?
Implementation: These policies require coordination across multiple departments — the Labour and Welfare Bureau, the Education Bureau, the Immigration Department, the Mandatory Provident Fund Authority, the Hospital Authority, and others. How will implementation progress be monitored? How should the policies be adjusted as conditions change?
None of the above questions can be answered by intuition. Each one requires local data, international comparisons, long-term tracking, and repeated deliberation among different stakeholders.
4. Beyond Population: Similar Issues Pervade the Five-Year Plan
And this is just one area — ‘population’. Questions of the same kind arise in every area that any five-year plan must inevitably address:
Housing — the immediate pressure of public-housing waitlists exceeding five years, set against the large long-term supply planned for the Northern Metropolis over ten to twenty years: how should fiscal and land resources be allocated across these different timeframes?
Industry — the ‘Eight Centres’ inevitably compete with one another for talent, capital, and policy attention: which should be prioritised first, and what resources should each receive?
Public finance — how should the fiscal path be designed between the shrinking tax base caused by a declining working-age population and the rising expectations for healthcare and welfare?
Healthcare — as ageing accelerates and the elderly population grows by nearly another million over the next ten years, with chronic disease replacing acute disease as the dominant healthcare demand, how should the role division between public and private healthcare systems be adjusted?
Labour — facing AI’s disruption of professional services alongside labour shortages in traditional industries, how should the system for retraining and job-transition support be designed?
Each of the above is a long-term question requiring active research and serious deliberation. The answer to none of them will surface automatically in a consultation.
5. Planning Requires Research
Lining up the two sets of questions above, one thing becomes clear: answering any one of them requires two kinds of work to proceed in parallel.
One is information processing — integrating local data, international experience, academic research, and industry knowledge from their scattered sources into a coherent judgement. This is technical work, requiring training, time, and professional judgment.
The other is consensus building — through repeated discussion, deliberation, and adjustment among different stakeholders, classes, and time horizons, ultimately arriving at a direction that society broadly endorses, or at least finds acceptable even if not fully satisfied. This is political work, but it equally requires research — because any trade-off, if not backed by reasoned argument, collapses into a mere contest of forces.
These two kinds of work together constitute the true substance of ‘planning’. A five-year plan that can actually be implemented is not an arithmetic average of competing demands; it is a directional judgement arrived at through information integration and argumentative contest — one that makes deliberate trade-offs.
Consultation provides the raw materials. Turning demands into judgements, judgements into direction, and direction into executable policy arguments — there is a distance to be covered. The ones who must walk this path are a professional team equipped with time, training, and independence. Its role is not lobbying, because it does not serve particular interests; nor is it carving up the pie, because it must make reasoned judgements on trade-offs for society as a whole. Its work has a technical name: policy research.
6. The Missing Link
In mature self-governing polities, this policy-research work is never carried by a single institution but by three types of institutions working in partnership.
Government houses internal policy-research units that synthesise information from all sides and provide analysis and recommendations to decision-makers. Universities, through long-term academic research, build deep understanding of specific policy domains. Independent policy-research institutions — think tanks in the broad sense — fill the middle layer between government and academia: more independent than government and therefore able to offer reasoned dissent on policy direction; more connected to policy practice than universities and therefore able to translate academic research into options decision-makers can use.
The three types complement one another — none can be missing. Without government’s direction, research has nowhere to land; without universities’ knowledge base, policy arguments lack depth; without independent think tanks’ intermediation and synthesis, the gap between government and academia cannot be bridged.
Hong Kong is thin in all three. On the government side: the Central Policy Unit has only around a dozen policy-research staff — compared with Singapore, which has a comparable population, where government alone fields a long-term policy-research establishment many times that size. On the university side: research incentives have shifted heavily towards international publication; academic promotion and reputation depend on breaking into top international journals, not on answering Hong Kong’s policy questions. On the think-tank side: local think tanks typically depend on a single sponsor and lack stable funding structures; when the sponsor’s attention shifts, the institution shrinks or shuts down altogether. All three are thin, and the middle layer of think tanks is the thinnest of all.
7. Conclusion
Mao’s 1930 line still holds today: no investigation, no right to speak. For a society to plan its own future with substance, it must first have the capacity to conduct substantial investigation and research.
This is a long-standing shortfall in local governance capacity. To make ‘One Country, Two Systems’ a success, Hong Kong must build a mature policy-research ecosystem. Where did this gap come from? Why must it be closed today? How can it be built? The next essay will begin to argue these questions from Hong Kong’s own history — the trajectory from colonial rule to alignment with the nation.
(Translation supported by AI)
