Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor visited Shenzhen on Thursday, her first official visit to Hong Kong's nearest neighbor in her role as CE of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. She met with top leaders of the Shenzhen municipal government and toured the Shenzhen-Hong Kong cooperation zone in Qianhai - a piece of land being developed into a high-tech design-centric industrial park catering mainly to innovation startups - as well as a few Shenzhen-based leading tech companies such as Huawei Technologies. Lam made it clear in her talks with Shenzhen officials that Hong Kong has high hopes for broad cooperation with the city and looks forward to further discussions about related matters with her Shenzhen counterparts.

Lam had visited Shenzhen many times during her career, especially as secretary for development and later chief secretary for administration, before taking office as the CE. It is fair to say she knows better than all others in the SAR government about the importance of Hong Kong-Shenzhen cooperation. That is why she spent her first official visit there on areas she believes hold the most potential for rich and lasting returns from intimate cooperation - design and technology innovation in many fields. Indeed, Hong Kong has long been known for its design talents in the region; while Shenzhen is drawing international attention as a "rising star" among cities regarded as hotbeds for innovation and tech startups around the world. Shenzhen is also the only mainland city to have earned recognition as a "City of Design" by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

More importantly, the two neighboring cities have been cooperating in a range of areas in the past 20 years and fully understand how much they will profit from working together in developing knowledge-intensive sectors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area city cluster, which is fast taking shape as we speak. It doesn't hurt to know that many Hong Kong-based manufacturers have kept their design units and top management teams back home when they moved their factories to Guangdong, beginning in Shenzhen and later Dongguan. It's time for that kind of business operation to take the next step in modernization, namely, driving Hong Kong's transformation into a knowledge economy closely linked to the national economy.

As Wang Weizhong, Party secretary of Shenzhen, pointed out, the two cities can do so much more in expanding their cooperation from here on now, and Qianhai is just a new starting point. The sky is the limit if only Hong Kong and Shenzhen combine their strengths and take a leading role in putting the Greater Bay Area city cluster on the world map, particularly with regard to the Belt and Road Initiative trade routes.

(HK Edition 09/01/2017 page11)