Hong Kong risks being left out of China’s breakneck growth with official think tank revamp, former chief says
Professor Lau Siu-kai says Central Policy Unit needs to focus on long-term planning above day-to-day coordination
The Hong Kong government risks losing touch with China’s national development plans by downgrading the role of the Central Policy Unit (CPU) under a revamp being pushed by the city’s leader, a former head of the think tank says.
Professor Lau Siu-kai, who led the organisation for 10 years from 2002, said: “If you don’t understand what the national strategy is and why, you can’t do anything to fit into it except for taking orders from Beijing or waiting for it to tell you what to do.
“This should not be the way Hong Kong is governed.”
Lau, who is now a vice-president of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, a semi-official think tank based in Beijing, said research by the CPU in the 2000s had helped the government advocate key joint development work in the Greater Pearl River Delta area.
The unit had looked closely at Hong Kong’s strategic status in the region and how it could use its global economic network and legal framework to integrate with the other economic communities of the delta, Lau said.