HK must promote new quality productive forces: FS

Financial Secretary Paul Chan on Friday said Hong Kong should leverage its unique advantages to promote new quality productive forces. Delivering his speech at a seminar on new quality productive forces, Chan said Hong Kong needs to work with other cities in the Greater Bay Area. "Firstly, we should actively make good use of Hong Kong's advantages as an international financial hub to strengthen all-round capital support for new quality productive forces. Secondly, it's to attract professionals and firms to here," he said. "Thirdly, we need to enhance our cooperation with the brother cities in the Greater Bay Area. That will definitely inject momentum into new quality productive forces and high quality development in the area." Speaking at the same event, Dean of the Institute of Contemporary China Studies of Tsinghua University, Hu Angang, said Hong Kong has an increasingly important role to play in the nation's economic modernisation. "We need to transfer the manufacturing sector from the developed areas near the coast towards the mid-west part area, forming a big domestic cycle. But most importantly, we need to encourage local firms, especially manufacturers, to invest and move overseas, forming a so-called international big cycle," he said. "This is the main strategy of China's economic modernisation. It is not a single cycle, but two inter-related cycles. The role and status of Hong Kong will not be lowered, but will continue to grow. " Hu added that the Chinese economy has been growing rapidly and predicted gross domestic product per capita to exceed US$30,000 by 2035.