Coronavirus: Hong Kong pinning border hopes on vaccination, zero local infections, but Guangdong official says reopening unlikely before March

A local pro-Beijing heavyweight has said boosting vaccinations could be a basis for resuming quarantine-free travel with mainland China soon

But a source across the border has poured cold water on that assessment, saying the status quo is unlikely to change before March

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People pass through the Shenzhen Bay border checkpoint in 2018. A source has said it is unlikely that the border will be reopened before march. Photo: Dickson Lee

Elizabeth Cheung,William ZhengandKathleen Magramo

Published: 8:00am, 9 Sep 2021Updated: 9:52pm, 9 Sep 2021

A higher Covid-19 vaccination rate and a sustained zero-infection streak are among prerequisites for Hong Kong resuming quarantine-free travel with mainland China, according to experts and a pro-Beijing heavyweight, but an official across the border has said the status quo is unlikely to change before March.

Local National People’s Congress Standing Committee delegate Tam Yiu-chung said on Wednesday he was optimistic that getting 5 million people vaccinated by the end of the month would be enough to convince the central and Guangdong governments to relax restrictions, even though authorities across the border have not set a concrete inoculation target for Hong Kong.

“We have reflected to the mainland authorities that our coronavirus cases are all imported, and we have stringent testing measures, while our vaccination numbers have also picked up. There could be a possibility of resuming cross-border travel,” Tam said.

However, a Guangdong government source with knowledge of discussions between Hong Kong and the mainland poured cold water on that assessment, saying he believed that March or April would be a more realistic timeline for an arrangement to be reached, adding that the call was ultimately up to Beijing.

“The mainland is just recovering from the previous round of outbreaks,” the source said. “With the politically sensitive October 1 National Day approaching and the Communist Party’s plenum in November, Beijing is hesitant to make the decision now as there is risk.”

Professor Zhong Nanshan, one of China’s top respiratory disease experts, had said in June that quarantine-free travel could resume as early as July if Hong Kong and its neighbouring province continued to “interact and monitor” the situation.

However, the situation has remained unchanged since then, and mainland authorities have declined to offer explicit criteria for reopening the border with Hong Kong. The city has tried to look for clues in Macau’s strategy for resuming cross-border travel, with the casino hub largely modelling its pandemic-control measures on the mainland’s.

But those parameters have proved similarly hard to pin down. An initial requirement that Hong Kong go 28 days without a local case was set in June, only to be revised to no fixed number of days the following month.