China decides to protect Hong Kong as a financial centre

WESTERN visitors returning to China for face-to-face meetings – as the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) did last week – will find a country as keen to attract outside investment as it is to develop a self-sufficient financial and technological ecosystem. Hong Kong’s role in this complex process seems more important than before.

Hong Kong has noticed a marked outflowing of wealth management operations to Singapore and is now putting together a well-funded campaign to try to reverse the trend.

To hear this from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, InvestHK and others based in the special administrative region (SAR) isn’t surprising. To hear it from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the major Chinese banks perhaps is. The clarity and uniformity of the message sounded like Chinese government policy. Why?