Outside In | Qianhai, with its promise of integration, is an opportunity Hong Kong would be wise to grasp
- Qianhai’s expansion, the result of a sustained push to develop Shenzhen and the Greater Bay Area, underlines Beijing’s preference for slow and steady, baby-step reforms
- With its potential role in the development and adoption of regulations and institutions that can integrate the region as a whole, the Qianhai plan is a step in the right direction
Back in 2009, Witman Hung, the indefatigable principal liaison officer for Hong Kong in Qianhai, swept myself and a gaggle of Hong Kong business executives across the border and up to the newly minted 14.9 sq km economic zone in the west of Shenzhen to introduce us to Qianhai – this outreach of Hong Kong law and regulation conceived to provide Hong Kong with a confidence-building springboard into the mainland economy.
Qianhai was a ghost town then and, by some people’s accounts, remains something of a ghost town today, though it now boasts more than 100,000 locally based companies, of which 11,500 are Hong Kong-registered.
The caution at the heart of this glacially slow development progress calls for patience. But Beijing’s preference for risk-minimising, baby-step reforms, over “big bang” changes that might be destabilising and inflict “big bang” harm, has been amply vindicated over the past four decades.
The economic progress made since 1980 provides clear evidence that development based on the cumulative impact of “baby step” reforms can, over time, deliver benefits that few “big bang” initiatives can match.