Hong Kong has ‘strategic ambiguities’ to navigate US-China rivalry: Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani

At a Hong Kong forum, the retired Singaporean diplomat addressed issues such as the prospect of ‘de-dollarisation’ of global trade to tensions in the Taiwan Strait

Hong Kong ‘enjoys the status’ of ‘one country, two systems’, but has to ‘work very hard’ to convince the US that it remains autonomous, Mahbubani says

Reading Time:3 minutes

Speaking at a forum in Hong Kong, Kishore Mahbubani addressed a wide range of issues, from the prospect of “de-dollarisation” of global trade to the tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Photo: Handout

Published: 8:22pm, 25 Apr 2023Updated: 9:54am, 26 Apr 2023

Hong Kong’s special status grants it “strategic ambiguities” to navigate the US-China rivalry, but it needs to do more to convince Washington’s power brokers that it retains autonomy in critical areas, the prominent China watcher Kishore Mahbubani has said.

Speaking at a forum in Hong Kong, the retired Singaporean top diplomat addressed a wide range of issues, from the prospect of “de-dollarisation” of global trade to the tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

Asked on how Hong Kong could best navigate the escalating rivalry between Beijing and Washington, Kishore noted during the question-and-answer session that the city – as part of China – was obliged to abide by national security “red lines”.

“Yet at the same time, you also enjoy the status of ‘one country, two systems’, [and] you have a lot of autonomy in some areas. How you exercise your autonomy requires a lot of political judgments,” Kishore said at the event organised by the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute. “And I would say equally importantly, you have to work very hard at convincing [the US] that you remain autonomous.”

Kishore Mahbubani said during the event that Hong Kong has to “work very hard” at convincing the US that it remains autonomous. File photo: Handout

Kishore, the founding dean of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said he discovered during a recent visit to the US that many in the country believed that Hong Kong had “lost all its autonomy [and] it’s no different from China”.