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Vivian Au

Fiona Sun

Regional cooperation is a key priority in Hong Kong’s first five-year plan. In the fourth of a five-part series on the plan, we look at how life in the Greater Bay Area can get better, with the right policies. Read part one here, part two here and part three here.
Eager to escape Hong Kong’s suffocating housing conditions, university administrative worker Polly Chan decided in 2023 to rent a weekend flat in Guangzhou.
On weekdays, she lives with her mother in a cramped 300 sq ft flat in Tai Po. On weekends, she does a two-hour commute via the East Rail line and Shenzhen North to her sanctuary for solitude: a 1,000 sq ft flat in Guangzhou that she rents for just 1,000 yuan (US$148) a month.
It is a steal compared with rental prices in Shenzhen which can reach as high as 7,000 yuan a month and the perfect place for the avid book lover to turn into her own reading haven.
Her only other option for her collection of books would have been to rent mini-storage units in Hong Kong, which cost at least HK$1,000 for a single cubic foot of space.
But now, for this twenty-something who earns HK$18,000 a month, the rent for the Guangzhou flat does not strain her finances. With cheap food available in the cosy neighbourhood, she has found the best of both worlds – a career in Hong Kong and leisure in mainland China.
“I am not renting storage space … I am paying for a tiny sliver of breathing room I have left,” she said.
Chan is among a growing cohort of young Hongkongers enjoying the benefits of regional connectivity – a key theme in Hong Kong’s inaugural five-year plan expected to be released by the end of September.

The government on Friday completed a two-month public consultation on the blueprint aimed at aligning the city’s development with the national plan from 2026 to 2030.
For residents like Chan, the Greater Bay Area (GBA) is slowly but surely removing Hong Kong’s traditional space constraints by allowing it to leverage cross-border networks to open up expansive frontiers – from career development and innovation hubs to integrated healthcare and retirement choices.
With greater transport links and infrastructure development, an increasingly seamless integration will offer even more residents and businesses an unprecedented palette of options for how they work, live and play, analysts have said.
But breaking through physical border barriers into regional opportunities, they said, would require concrete policy breakthroughs, from unified healthcare standards and legal mechanisms to streamlined transport links.
Time to get specific with tie-ups
For this next phase to succeed, former chief executive Leung Chun-ying envisioned that bay area integration would require moving beyond broad regional pledges towards highly specific district platforms.
Rather than attempting to collaborate with the bay area as an undifferentiated whole, he said, Hong Kong must pair its comparative advantages in sectors like biotech, research, and professional services with specific mainland hubs, such as Guangzhou’s Nansha or Shenzhen’s Qianhai.
Pointing to institutional partnerships like the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s initiatives in Nansha, he noted that targeted district collaboration boosted local research while leveraging mainland clinical capacity.
“Importantly, we talk about the five-year plan. We talk about GBA collaboration. We ought to be rather more specific, namely, it’s not just a question of when … or the where question. The question really is what and how,” he said.
“We need to find a platform in the GBA. We cannot just talk about the GBA as a whole because … it is huge. You need to find a landing port, something like Nansha … So it’s a combination of where, and by where I mean a specific location.”
He added: “And not just the mainland of China generally or the nine cities in Guangdong province generally; it has to be specific – where in the Guangdong part of the GBA and what Hong Kong can do.”
He added that deeper integration over the next five to 10 years hinged on streamlining the “four flows” of human capital, capital, goods, and data, while strictly upholding “one country, two systems”.

Crucially, he stressed that integration did not mean turning Hong Kong into another mainland city or relinquishing its separate customs jurisdiction and currency, calling on media, business chambers, and professional bodies to establish a permanent presence to bridge information gaps.
Beijing officially launched the blueprint for the bay area in early 2019 with the aim of developing it into one of the world’s largest economic and business hubs.
In 2022, the bay area’s nominal gross domestic product (GDP) crossed 13 trillion yuan, up from about 12.6 trillion yuan in 2021, according to official data.
The bay area covers about 56,000 sq km – 50 times the size of Hong Kong – with a total of more than 86 million people. That makes it larger and more populous than the world’s three leading bay areas in New York, Tokyo and San Francisco.
The region is made up of Hong Kong and Macau and the Guangdong cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing.
In the 2019 blueprint, Hong Kong was to consolidate its status as an international hub for finance, trade, transport and aviation, while building closer ties with mainland cities, connecting them with the global community.
Lifesaver for young and elderly
If the plan succeeds, the new expansion will be equally compelling for retirees seeking dignity and financial comfort in later life.
Early movers like Hongkonger Kitty Wong Wing-mui, 64, are already paving the way.
Wong moved a decade ago to an 800 sq ft home in Panyu district in Guangzhou.
Every Monday, she attends electronic keyboard classes at a university for the elderly there, and every Wednesday she takes sketching lessons.
She also swims at a pool, paying a discounted entrance fee of 8 yuan for older residents. On Tuesdays, she watches a film at a cinema near her home, where tickets can cost as little as 19.9 yuan, comparable to discounted tickets in Hong Kong for senior citizens.
Wong said she enjoyed exploring the city and taking advantage of half-price bus and subway rides offered to older residents, noting she would be eligible for free public transport when she turned 65.
With insurance she bought herself, she pays only part of her consultation fees at hospitals in Guangzhou, while also making use of the city’s free annual health check-ups for older people.
“Life is more diverse and colourful here in Guangzhou,” the retiree said. “The more I live here, the more I love this place.”
A divorcee with no children, Wong moved to Guangzhou 10 years ago after her marriage ended. She had bought her three-bedroom flat in Guangzhou earlier when her job as a purchasing manager required frequent cross-border travel.
She said life in Guangzhou was better and cheaper than in Hong Kong.
“I have made friends with a group of like-minded people who share similar interests, and many of them also speak Cantonese,” she said. “Although I live alone, I don’t feel lonely.”
Proximity and convenient transport also made Guangzhou appealing, allowing her to take a bus or high-speed train back to Hong Kong for yum cha with friends and relatives. But she admitted to having a festering worry about what would happen if she fell seriously ill and needed to return to Hong Kong for treatment.

Similarly, Hong Kong retiree Lily Ma, 72, lives in Liwan, one of Guangzhou’s oldest districts, with her two sons, daughters-in-law and two grandchildren. Ma said retirement on the mainland suited her well.
“The living spaces in Hong Kong are too small and expenses are too high,” the divorcee said.
“On the contrary, life is much cheaper, easier and more comfortable in Guangzhou.”
Ma settled in Guangzhou permanently late last year after her mother died in Hong Kong, having previously travelled between the two cities regularly to care for her.
She chose to live across the border because of the larger homes, more convenient services, and better medical and welfare arrangements.
Ma noted that a public rental flat of about 100 sq ft cost around HK$1,000 a month in Hong Kong, whereas for the same amount she could rent a home of 400 to 500 sq ft in Guangzhou.
She also recalled that when she was treated at a public hospital in Hong Kong in 2022 for gallstones, she was told she would have to wait four years for surgery, whereas on the mainland there was no such lengthy wait.
Today, she shops online for daily necessities, volunteers at elderly care facilities, and takes short trips with friends.
“I have seen more Hongkongers moving to Guangzhou in recent years,” Ma said.
Areas of friction remain
While lifestyle benefits attract residents, systemic hurdles in healthcare, law, and social services remain a persistent concern for long-term cross-border living.
Vincent Tso, president of the GBA Lawyers Organisation, stated that the bay area’s “one country, two systems, three legal jurisdictions” framework was an asset if authorities focused on operational alignment.
He said critical cross-border bottlenecks in data compliance and capital mobility persisted due to uncoordinated regulatory mechanisms and non-overlapping compliance standards.
To enable true fluidity, he urged authorities to formalise mature pilot policies into statutory law, such as lawyer qualification measures, and establish mutual recognition of standards to eliminate duplicate compliance burdens.
Lawmaker Simon Hoey Lee echoed this by emphasising that Hong Kong must act as a “global gateway and rule connector” for the area, serving as the critical interface where Chinese innovation meets international standards.
To achieve seamless movement of capital, data, and talent, he proposed a bay area-wide regulatory sandbox, a unified market access and intellectual property (IP hub), and a “GBA data trust framework” built on standardised cross-border contracts.

Eric Siu Ying-kit, founding president of the Greater Bay Area Medical Professional Development Association, said that deep structural gaps in healthcare financing and regulatory misalignment continued to hamper attempts to seamlessly integrate Hong Kong’s elderly care model with mainland systems.
He said that practical links remained fragmented between Hong Kong’s publicly funded primary care framework and the mainland’s national basic medical insurance system.
To bridge these hurdles, he suggested a “systems-first, market-second” strategy to clear persistent administrative bottlenecks, such as expanding cross-border data interoperability and widening the scope of imported Hong Kong-registered chronic disease medications.
He emphasised that achieving seamless long-term residential care required establishing unified “bay area standards”, combining Hong Kong’s nursing oversight with the mainland’s spatial infrastructure and telemedicine networks.
“A unified certification standard would strategically combine Hong Kong’s quality-of-care expertise with the mainland’s spatial and facility advantages,” he said.
Reinforcing these concerns, lawmaker Kingsley Wong Kwok noted that while expanding healthcare vouchers for use in Shenzhen had been effective, public hospital patients living further afield, such as in Guangzhou or Zhongshan, must still endure long, exhausting trips back to Hong Kong for routine check-ups.
Establishing formal links between Hong Kong public hospitals and designated mainland facilities would allow seniors to receive subsidised follow-up care closer to home, he added.
Just as critical, policymakers had to look seriously at end-of-life arrangements, ensuring adequate planning would be done by seniors, especially those without family in Hong Kong or local guardians on the mainland.
He also urged authorities to resolve a crucial legal bottleneck by allowing mainland non-governmental organisations to act as legal guardians for solitary retirees who lacked local relatives, enabling them to secure care home admissions and end-of-life arrangements.
On a macro level, realising the bay area’s “one-hour living circle” required shifting priorities from train speed to removing the last-mile journey friction, according to Ryan Ip Man-ki, vice-president of think tank Our Hong Kong Foundation.
Adopting joint clearance models like Huanggang Port alongside e-channels and unified ticketing would already slash border transit times to five minutes, he noted.
On the business front, Alberto Moel, professor of practice in finance at the University of Hong Kong’s business school, said the city must leverage its native research to serve as an international innovation gateway rather than allowing its tech ecosystem to be subsumed into the mainland.
While university outposts on the mainland, such as in Qianhai, help bridge research and manufacturing, he urged local start-ups to retain a foothold in Hong Kong even as they expanded north, and continue to ride on the city’s distinct legal and financial structures.
This way, their Hong Kong origins would allow global investors to recognise them as sufficiently nimble and international and not be seen as just domestic Chinese firms.

He emphasised that Hong Kong possessed a distinct structural advantage over Singapore due to its native technology, engineering talent and direct access to nearby large-scale mainland manufacturing.
For many in Hong Kong, for now at least, seamless connectivity is less about macroeconomics and more about personal lifestyle.
“Policy integration sounds abstract, but for me, it’s just my weekend commute,” Polly Chan said.
“Hong Kong gives me an international career, but the mainland gives me space, affordable food, and actual room to rest that I could never get here. It really does feel like living in two worlds at once.”


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Hong Kong society

‘Enjoying two worlds at once’: work in Hong Kong, live and play in Greater Bay Area

Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

The lower prices in cities such as Guangzhou allow Hongkongers to enjoy the best of both worlds – a career in Hong Kong and leisure on the mainland. Photo: AFP

Former city leader Leung Chun-ying says Hong Kong must pair its strengths in biotech, research and professional services with specific mainland hubs in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Photo: Dickson Lee

More Hongkongers are moving to Guangzhou to access cheaper medical services with shorter waiting times. Photo: Getty Images

Legislator Simon Lee Hoey says Hong Kong must act as a “global gateway and rule connector” for the bay area, helping Chinese innovation meet international standards. Photo: Jelly Tse

The MixC shopping centre in Nansha. For many in Hong Kong, connectivity to the bay area is less about macroeconomics than about cheaper and better lifestyle options. Photo: May Tse

The Greater Bay Area, which includes cities like Shenzhen (pictured), covers about 56,000 sq km with a total of more than 86 million people. Photo: Xinhua

On weekends, Tai Po resident Polly Chan travels via the East Rail line and Shenzhen North railway station to Guangzhou, where she rents a 1,000 sq ft flat for HK$1,000 a month. Photo: Jelly Tse

What comes next for Hong Kong as a global financial hub?

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Our Hong Kong Foundation vice-president Kenny Shui says yuan globalisation is a key plank of Beijing’s plans for Hong Kong under the 15th national five-year plan. Photo: Elson LI

Mofiz Chan of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Professionals Association says the city should offer more renminbi-denominated products to boost the yuan’s pricing power among international assets. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Dan Ronald Leung, CEO of Esperanza Fintech Group, says the city needs to help Chinese financial products expand overseas at a time when the US dollar is being “deglobalised”. Photo: Jonathan Wong

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News

Hong Kong

Politics

Society

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Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen 

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The bay area is gradually removing traditional space constraints for Hongkongers by giving them access to cross-border networks and services


The bay area is gradually removing traditional space constraints for Hongkongers by giving them access to cross-border networks and services.


Greater Bay Area

Hong Kong economy

Guangzhou

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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The bay area is gradually removing traditional space constraints for Hongkongers by giving them access to cross-border networks and services

The bay area is gradually removing traditional space constraints for Hongkongers by giving them access to cross-border networks and services