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| Past Events: Bay Area Experience: Evidence-based Policy Webinar Series |
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Limits to Hong Kong’s Integration in the Greater Bay Area
25 March 2022 | 11:00–12:15 (UTC+8) | Zoom |
Speaker
Prof. Yun-wing Sung
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Adjunct Professor, Department of Economics, CUHK
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Discussants
Prof. Jianfa Shen
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Professor, Department of Geography and Resource Management, CUHK
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Prof. Sara H. Zhong
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Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, CUHK
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Moderator
Prof. Fanny M. Cheung
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Senior Advisor, Faculty of Social Science and HKIAPS, CUHK
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The Webinar Series on Bay Area Experience organized by Policy Research @ HKIAPS presented a Webinar on the topic “Limits to Hong Kong’s Integration in the Greater Bay Area” on 25 March 2022. In this webinar, the main speaker, Prof. Yun-wing Sung described and explained the limited level of integration achieved by Hong Kong in the last three decades using three strands of economic theories in integration. The two discussants, Prof. Jianfa Shen and Prof. Sara Zhong, further explored and elaborated on the difficulties and barriers to successful regional economic integration in the case of the Greater Bay Area (GBA).
Prof. Sung identified the unique arrangement of Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” as the major attribute setting both the framework for and limits to Hong Kong’s integration in the GBA. In his study conducted in 1995, he characterized the arrangement as “subregional economic integration with Chinese characteristics”. He found that before the handover of sovereignty in 1997 Hong Kong had not achieved deep integration with the GBA nor did the level of integration match with the classical European model, but that a specific level of integration between Hong Kong and the Greater Pearl River Delta region had developed due to the different political, legal, and economic systems between the two places. The difficulties with integration have persisted in the subsequent two decades. The three major asymmetries, namely openness, level of development, and size, have become the major challenges to the integration of Hong Kong into the GBA. In this webinar, Prof. Sung placed an emphasis on the size of Hong Kong, claiming that Hong Kong is too small to be able to provide the space and resources needed to absorb an influx of Mainland visitors/migrants. He contended that the resulting overcrowding has had a socio-political impact and led to social conflicts between mainlanders and Hong Kongese in the past two decades. However, 2021 could be regarded as a watershed in Hong Kong’s integration into the GBA, since the COVID-19 pandemic has minimized conflicts between Hong Kong and the GBA. It can be observed that Hong Kong’s resistance to mainland health workers and professionals has largely disappeared from the recent fifth wave of COVID. A decisive change in Hong Kong’s resistance toward integration may occur in the post-COVID era.
Prof. Shen shared Prof. Sung’s views on the limits to Hong Kong integration into the GBA. He discussed the possibility that different sectors could achieve better integration under the situation of varying difficulties to integration. He also believed that the government could involve more private or outside companies in mega infrastructure projects. The other discussant, Prof. Zhong, proposed alternative theoretical approaches to understanding the existing challenges to integration, including a clash of civilizations, world-system theory, migration, and the effect of the media. She pointed out that social and cultural differences between Hong Kong and Mainland China could become barriers to integration between Hong Kong and the GBA.
A total of 62 local and regional participants attended the webinar.
Video
Articles:
1. Reflections on Hong Kong’s integration into the GBA: Constraints and breakthroughs (in Chinese) 
2. Overcoming the bottlenecks of Hong Kong’s integration into the GBA (in Chinese)
Organizer
Policy Research @ HKIAPS, CUHK
Co-sponsor
Global China Research Programme, CUHK
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