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Marching Ahead amid Changes

It is New Year’s Eve today and the Hong Kong Tourism Board will stage the largest-ever Hong Kong New Year Countdown Celebrations tonight, featuring a firework extravaganza off Central and Causeway Bay that spans a distance of 1 300 metres. The countdown fireworks will last for about 12 minutes, the longest one in its history. So do visit our marvellous Victoria Harbour promenade with your relatives and friends tonight to welcome the New Year amid the sparkling and dazzling fireworks.

Looking back on 2023, Hong Kong has embarked on the road towards full normalcy. Our normal travel and exchanges with the Mainland and the rest of the world have gradually resumed. The economy has returned to growth with unemployment rate falling to a low level and inflation staying moderate. Meanwhile, we are also faced with numerous challenges such as heightening geopolitical tensions, adjustments to the global supply chains, interest rates that remained at a higher level, a weak external economic revival, as well as changes in consumption pattern of our residents and visitors. All these have put pressure on our merchandise exports, economic recovery and asset market performance.

To strengthen economic recovery, we launched another round of consumption vouchers in early 2023 and have been exploring ideas and various activities in order to stimulate spending. Early this year, we organised a series of “Happy Hong Kong” events, including Gourmet Marketplaces, Farmkets and the Harbour Chill Carnival, hoping to offer more places and activities for the public to go enjoy and inject more positive energy into the market after three years of living with the pandemic.

To spice up the city’s nightlife, we then launched the “Night Vibes Hong Kong” event. Apart from the popular Waterfront Carnivals held earlier at various harbourfront sites, the recent Temple Street Night Market has also been well received by members of the public and tourists alike. I spent some time visiting Temple Street yesterday and was delighted to meet our fellow residents and a lot of tourists from the Mainland, nearby regions and all the way from America and Europe. Together we enjoyed world delicacies at the food stalls, talked about the history of Temple Street and the origin of various snacks, and extended New Year’s greetings to each other in a relaxing and pleasant atmosphere. I was told by some tourists that they visited Temple Street as the place was famously unique, and they were pleasantly surprised to find the night market food stalls set up as part of the Temple Street Night Market.

In the coming year, we will have even more mega events and activities that highlight Hong Kong’s diverse and inclusive east-meets-west culture, as well as the advantage of its convenient connectivity with the Mainland and the rest of the world. By organising more events with different themes, orientations and contents, and injecting more new elements and experience into them, friends from the Mainland and overseas will be more likely and willing to revisit Hong Kong, making this city an ideal destination for business, cultural experience, leisure travel and family vacations.

These large-scale activities include sports, arts and cultural, and trade and financial events. Regarding sports events, there will be the Hong Kong Marathon (January), Hong Kong Sevens (April), Hong Kong International Dragon Boat Races (June) and Hong Kong Cyclothon (October), amongst others. These events do more than attract numerous contestants from different parts of the world; they also draw to Hong Kong a large number of spectators who are sports enthusiasts.

For arts and culture, the Hong Kong Arts Festival held in February, the Hong Kong Entertainment Expo, Arts in Hong Kong and Art Basel in March, as well as the Hong Kong Book Fair in July, are some of the exciting events to which many of us look forward. Among them, Art Basel will be fully restored to its pre-pandemic scale, with the participation of over 240 art galleries from 40 countries and regions.

On trade, as Hong Kong is an international trade centre, we serve as the most important exhibition and sourcing platform each year for many industries and merchandises, such as jewellery, timepieces, wines and electronic products. The Hong Kong International Jewellery Show and the Hong Kong International Diamond, Gem & Pearl Show held early this year brought together over 2 500 exhibitors and attracted over 60 000 buyers from 130 countries and regions to Hong Kong. These exhibitions will be held again next February.

As far as finance is concerned, various large-scale international financial events which were successfully held in Hong Kong this year had attracted a host of leaders from top-notch financial institutions from across the globe, fully showcasing Hong Kong’s status as an international financial centre. Looking ahead, a series of large-scale international financial events will be held one after another next year, including the Asian Financial Forum in January, East Asia Insurance Congress in September, and FinTech Week and Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in November.

While trying out some delicacies with tourists at the stalls on Temple Street yesterday, I introduced the history of Temple Street and the local snack culture, as well as extended my New Year’s greetings to them.

In addition to “bringing in” visitors, we have also been “reaching out” to the rest of the world over the past year, making visits to places from the Mainland to Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States and North Africa. Through attending international conferences and conducting business visits, we have strengthened our efforts to explain to the business and financial sectors in those places Hong Kong’s latest development and the new opportunities that come with it, while actively attracting enterprises, investments and talent to Hong Kong. These efforts have enabled us to consolidate our connection with the rest of the world in respect of finance, trade and business, and expand our “circle of friends”. Next month, I will attend the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting again in Davos, Switzerland, where I will introduce our new strengths to top political and economic leaders worldwide.

Over the past year, we have also pressed ahead with the development of our finance-innovation and technology (I&T) dual engine. With regard to I&T, we have speeded up efforts in promoting I&T industrialisation, and achieved some progress in attracting strategic I&T enterprises, including a major international pharmaceutical firm and a leading new energy company, to settle in Hong Kong. These enterprises will bring substantial investments and jobs, and attract the upstream, midstream and downstream partners of their respective industry chains to the city, helping to enrich our I&T ecosystem and accelerate the development of our I&T sector. In respect of finance, we have strengthened co-operation with such new markets as the Middle East and ASEAN, and welcomed the listing of Asia’s first Saudi Arabia ETF in Hong Kong at the end of the year. In addition, we have continued to deepen our connectivity with the financial markets in the Mainland. New initiatives such as Swap Connect and the HKD-RMB Dual Counter Model were launched during the year, further expanding the scope and capacity of the mutual access mechanism and enhancing our function as an offshore RMB business hub.

I believe that having sown the seeds through all the efforts mentioned above, we will reap a bumper harvest in the coming year and beyond.

At the end of each year, we always look back and try to learn from experience; but it is also the time to look ahead and prepare ourselves for new challenges. Challenges, though possibly revolving around the same themes each year, may still present new issues in light of new development trends and changing environments. This requires us to keep exploring new pathways and new solutions. We must therefore stay curious and humble with an open mind. Keep learning, be bold to innovate, and respond flexibly to the fast changing environment and open up new horizons. As we welcome the arrival of 2024, let us join hands, support one another and paint a brighter future with vibrant colours!

December 31, 2023