Previously, I put forward the argument that Hong Kong’s relevance in China’s opening up lies less in guarding its gateway role and more in developing new forms of partnership. Since then, Hainan has set up distinct island-wide customs operations from December 18.
This is a turning point – one that invites Hong Kong to think not only about how to cooperate, but how to co-design the next phase of China’s engagement with the world.
Hainan’s transformation is ambitious. Around 6,600 types of goods now qualify for zero-tariff entry, up from roughly 1,900, while goods with at least 30 per cent value added in Hainan can enter the mainland duty-free. These changes are part of the province’s shift to a high-standard trading-zone structure.
This scale of reform raises questions for Hong Kong. As its traditional positioning evolves, the instinct might be to protect existing advantages. A better response would be to engage with Hainan’s reforms, not just as a participant or complementary service hub, but as a co-architect of governance arrangements that reinforce China’s economic resilience.
This shift matters because complementarity has practical limits. If Hainan is now empowered to shape tariff rules, regulatory pilot zones and tax environments for high-value services, it is also implicitly being asked to generate mechanisms and norms for cross-border flows.
For those mechanisms to gain international traction, they need external trust anchors, and Hong Kong provides them with its common law foundations, international regulatory language, dispute resolution capacity and long-established investor confidence.
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