Hong Kong’s population policy is still trapped in a city state mindset

Hong Kong is increasingly being urged to develop a comprehensive population policy. Academics, policymakers and business leaders warn that rapid ageing, low fertility and a shrinking labour force threaten the city’s competitiveness, and call for more decisive government intervention. Most such calls converge around two familiar strategies: encouraging Hong Kong women to have more children and attracting more immigrants. Both approaches assume Hong Kong must resolve its demographic challenges largely within its boundaries. That assumption reflects a city state logic. Yet Hong Kong today functions more like a core city within a vast mega-metropolitan region. Population policy built on the former mindset risks misdiagnosing the problem. Hong Kong’s low fertility is no longer primarily a behavioural issue but increasingly a structural constraint. According to government statistics, Hongkongers’ median age rose to 49.4 years last year, with nearly a quarter of the population aged 65 or older. Most women are 40 or older – past the typical age for childbearing. More generous incentives or family-friendly policies can raise fertility only at the margins when the pool of potential mothers is shrinking – a significant rebound in babies is unrealistic. But this is not a failure of policy ambition or political will. When a city has aged as far as Hong Kong has, a birth-centred population policy can at best slow the decline; it cannot reverse it. Immigration is often presented as a more practical alternative. Hong Kong has long depended on talent inflows and remaining open to skills and labour is widely seen as essential. Yet much of the debate collapses two very different processes into one: cross-border immigration and intra-metropolitan relocation. In large metropolitan regions, labour supply is frequently renewed not by families settling in the core city, but by movement across nearby jurisdictions within the same regional system, driven more by different life-course needs. New York City provides a clear illustration. More than 36 per cent of its residents are foreign-born, with less than half born in the US state. Many working in the city do not live there. Hundreds of thousands of workers commute daily from neighbouring New Jersey. These households are not treated as immigrants requiring permanent settlement. They are part of a normal metropolitan labour circulation system. New York’s demographic sustainability depends less on where families live within municipal borders than on whether the wider metropolitan region supports mobility, housing choices and commuting. This distinction matters for Hong Kong. Treating population renewal solely as a question of immigration ignores a central feature of how modern metropolitan regions function. Relocation across nearby cities can play the same demographic role as local population growth without requiring permanent settlement. This city state logic did not emerge by accident. It was shaped when Hong Kong’s borders were treated as administratively rigid, cross-boundary population mobility was tightly controlled and demographic planning necessarily took place largely in isolation from surrounding cities. Under those historical conditions, thinking in terms of a self-contained population framework made institutional sense. What is striking is that nearly three decades after 1997, population policymaking continues to reflect this inherited administrative logic despite Hong Kong now being part of an increasingly integrated mega-metropolitan region. The persistence of this mindset is not ideological; it is institutional. But it is increasingly misaligned with present-day demographic and economic realities. Shanghai further illustrates the point. It is one of China’s most rapidly ageing cities and over 29 per cent of the population was already aged 65 and above in 2024. Although Shanghai has measures to support families with children, it does not rely on boosting births in the city core as its primary population strategy. Instead, labour and population planning increasingly operate through a regional lens within the Yangtze River Delta integration framework, with younger workers and families drawn from surrounding cities while the core city concentrates on advanced services, finance and innovation. Population ageing is addressed mainly through spatial and functional coordination across the metropolitan region rather than demographic self-sufficiency at the city level. Viewed through a metropolitan lens, Hong Kong’s situation is less exceptional than often implied. The Greater Bay Area is demographically diverse by design. Hong Kong is among the oldest cities. By contrast, Shenzhen remains the youngest large Chinese city. Modern metropolitan regions do not expect each core city to be demographically self-sufficient. Instead, they rely on mobility across cities and life courses. People may work in the core city, form families elsewhere in the region, and move again as circumstances change. For Hong Kong, the objective of population policy should not be to induce more women to have children. It should be to ensure people, skills and families can move smoothly across cities with different demographic roles, while Hong Kong continues to specialise in high-value economic, professional and institutional functions. Hong Kong does need a population policy. But it should begin by abandoning the assumption that it must somehow recover demographic self-sufficiency. Persistently low fertility is a reality that policy can mitigate but not reverse quickly. Immigration remains essential, but it should be understood as part of regional population circulation. The deeper task is to align housing, labour, education, health, social care and family-related policies with the Greater Bay Area’s demographic system, rather than treating Hong Kong as an island. Population ageing is not unique to Hong Kong. What would be genuinely exceptional is continuing to address it with a city state mindset in an era defined by mega-metropolitan integration.

Hong Kong’s population policy is still trapped in a city state mindset

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Rather than encouraging more births, Hong Kong should align its family-related policies with the Greater Bay Area’s demographic system

Rather than encouraging more births, Hong Kong should align its family-related policies with the Greater Bay Area’s demographic system