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Opinion
To boost investor enthusiasm for China, start with Hong Kong tycoons
- When it comes to China, many international investors take their cue from Hong Kong’s business leaders – like they did 45 years ago
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Wang Xiangwei is a senior visiting scholar (2026-27) at the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy School, and a former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post.
China’s top leaders are set to hold a long-delayed pivotal meeting soon, and are expected to discuss a new growth model and offer a clearer path for the world’s second-largest economy. But clarity is very hard to detect even with the meeting, widely called a plenum, just a few weeks away.
Optimists and pessimists are talking past one another as to what can be expected of the enclave, which could have far-reaching repercussions for the rest of the world. State media have played up China’s determination to pursue “high-quality development” and “high-level opening up”, President Xi Jinping’s favourite catchphrases, trying to build up expectations of major policy moves at the plenum, set to be held from July 15-18.
In a recent visit to Australia, Premier Li Qiang told local businessmen that China was planning major measures to further comprehensively deepen reforms and steadily expand institutional opening-up, and that China’s investment environment will get better.
But investors and entrepreneurs at home and abroad who have heard those high-sounding slogans too many times over the past four years, but have seen too little action to promote the private sector and market forces, have remained downright pessimistic.
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