What next for Hong Kong?

Hong Kong’s niche as a secure gateway to China is under threat as China opens its markets to foreign money.

"Even in a city known for its frenetic pace, the change since Britain handed back Hong Kong to China 20 years ago has been remarkable," says Daniel Shane in Barron's. These days you are just as likely to hear Mandarin, the Middle Kingdom's national language, as Cantonese, the local one. This is symptomatic of the territory's gradual loss of status and influence in the Chinese context.

In 2003, notes Yue Wang in Forbes, Hong Kong had the world's busiest container port. Now it ranks fifth. Hong Kong comprised a fifth of China's GDP in 1997; now just 3%. The local stockmarket, moreover, has been eclipsed by Shanghai.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.