Forget Singapore and Shenzhen – Hong Kong’s only competition in beating the brain drain is its past self

The government’s policies on talent are confusing, with moves to import workers sitting alongside telling local youth to go elsewhere for career opportunities
Leaders should focus on restoring an environment in which people can earn a good living and not worry about comparisons with other places

Dennis Lee

Published: 8:15am, 13 Apr 2023

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In a hotel refurbishment project we have been working on since 2019, there has been a steady flow of top staff from consultancy and contracting companies resigning. And, they have not just left the job – they have left Hong Kong.

“Nobody is indispensable”, the old saying goes, but the project has suffered whenever knowledge and time were lost. Design and construction is a field that demands deep technical know-how and industry experience, and every project is unique.

Nobody, regardless of their skill level, can immediately pick up where a predecessor left off as they need time to learn the ropes. The worst-case scenario would be when an incompetent person fills the vacant role, potentially making mistakes or stalling progress. Unfortunately, a brain drain is the norm these days.

This is just one hotel project. It is not unique in facing talent loss, and neither is the design and construction industry at large. From medicine and finance to education and tech, every industry is eager to hire in post-pandemic Hong Kong.

According to the Inland Revenue Department, there were some 370,000 fewer taxpayers in the financial year ending on March 31 compared to three years ago. Meanwhile, Census and Statistics Department figures show Hong Kong’s workforce dropped by more than 94,000 people in 2022 compared to a year previously.

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The mixed messages from officials are confusing. On one hand, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han is promoting the Greater Bay Area Youth Employment Scheme, which subsidises regional employers if they hire fresh Hong Kong graduates. On the other, the government has launched the Top Talent Pass Scheme in December.

These concurrent policies make sense only if our end goal is to replace our lost talent with foreigners but have no intention of nurturing the next generation. A company’s most important resources are its people, and resources grow when wisdom is passed down from seasoned veterans to hungry rookies.

Imagine a company that kept losing valuable staff and desperately hired replacements who were an unknown quantity, while at the same time encouraging its young employees and interns to look for opportunities elsewhere, and subsidising other companies to hire them. What are we trying to achieve here?

Employers know talent can be tough to find, and what looks good on a CV might not carry over into reality. Self-motivated, knowledgeable and hard-working employees are a rarity, akin to something that can only be found through serendipity rather than effort, as one Chinese saying goes. Simply hitting key performance indicators or quotas might not translate into solving Hong Kong’s talent issue.

A look at history shows this phenomenon is not irreversible. Remember the exodus after the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in 1984. Tens of thousands of people left Hong Kong annually from 1990 to 1997, peaking at more than 66,000 departures in 1992.

95 per cent of approved applicants for Hong Kong talent scheme from mainland China

Many of those who left Hong Kong eventually returned, as did their children, in part because the city offered a stable environment in which to live and work. In short, when the economy was booming and people’s livelihoods improved, most were apolitical and focused on making a living or getting rich.

Hong Kong leaders’ mission should be to restore that favourable environment. We are second to none with a strong common law system, open market, low business tax rate and trilingual proficiency. We also remain the only real gateway to the mainland Chinese market. The only difference between now and four years ago is whether we can restore the confidence and high degree of autonomy we had for 20-odd years after the handover.

We do not need a competing city as a benchmark for our well-being. There was some agitation among critics and lawmakers last year when Hong Kong slipped behind Singapore to fourth place in the Global Financial Centres Index. We should not be too upset by certain rankings or indexes where the parameters, periods and other metrics can be manufactured and manipulated by valuation agencies.

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Inspirational speaker Simon Sinek says most leaders do not know the game they are in. Some might say they are the best at what they do, but what context, parameters, categories or time frame are they using? Who picks these metrics? Do all the other players concur with them, or were they even interested in joining the competition?

He also says business practice is not a finite game with known players, fixed rules and agreed-on objectives. The infinite players, instead of worrying about their competition, focus on their own growth. The same should apply to Hong Kong. There are no referees, clocks or trophies in our “competition” with Singapore, Shenzhen or other Asian cities – we are merely in the infinite game of growth, development and advancement.

We can fix our own mistakes, learn from our neighbours, adopt good ideas and discard obsolete ones. We should import workers not because someone else is doing it too, but because we have assessed our upcoming development projects, evaluated our current and projected labour shortages and launched policies to address our needs.

We should keep recruiting, and the best recruitment strategy is when we restore a stable society with the capacity to accommodate differences. We should invest in our young people, offer them unparalleled opportunities and keep our talent at home. Hong Kong does not need to beat anyone else, we only need to beat our past selves.

Dennis Lee is a Hong Kong-born, America-licensed architect with years of design experience in the US and China