Hong Kong's Pivot to the Global South
To many observers, Beijing's harsh crackdowns and sweeping security laws have reduced Hong Kong to just another Chinese city, indistinguishable from those on the mainland. While that conclusion is understandable, it is also an oversimplification. Instead, rather than complete assimilation, Beijing is seeking to enhance Hong Kong's international status – but on its own terms.
The latest sign is the new International Organization of Mediation (IOMed), overseen by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which now has dozens of other countries on board. Unlike other Chinese-led international initiatives that typically base themselves in Beijing or Shanghai, this one has planted its headquarters in Hong Kong. It's the first time an intergovernmental organization has made the city its home.
Analysts see this move as part of Beijing's effort to revive Hong Kong's global reputation as an international city. Chinese officials continue to emphasize Hong Kong's 'unique advantages,' namely its global networks, free-market economy, and common-law system, which make the city irreplaceable as a link between China and the rest of the world.
According to Tian Feilong, director of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, IOMed fits into Beijing's long-term plan to situate Hong Kong at the center of China's 'high-level diplomacy, global governance, and soft power construction.' Tian even predicted that IOMed will be just the first of many Beijing-backed international bodies to take root in Hong Kong.
However, IOMed's heavy focus on the Global South also signals a new direction for Hong Kong's international role. Though it professes an open membership, all 33 of IOMed's current member states come from the Global South, with many having especially close diplomatic ties to Beijing. Most of the countries that have signed the United Nations' Singapore Convention on Mediation (a major international mediation accord) are conspicuously absent. This is no coincidence: IOMed's website presents the organization as a 'public good' born of the Global South, and its founding convention emphasizes capacity-building in dispute resolution for developing countries as a core mission.
While all of this aligns with Beijing's broader strategy to expand influence among developing countries, it also reflects a deeper shift in the hosting city. Hong Kong is being repositioned to serve China's Global South agenda, gradually moving away from its conventional role connecting China and the West.
Strategic Reorientation Toward the Global South
Hong Kong's international role has always been shaped by China's strategic priorities. Throughout much of the Cold War, Hong Kong – which remained under British control until 1997 – was China's sole gateway to the global free-market system, a vital conduit for commerce between communist China and the capitalist economies. Beijing managed this arrangement deliberately as early as the 1950s, when Premier Zhou Enlai advocated the 'long-term planning and full utilization' of Hong Kong, explicitly rejecting internal calls to seize the British colony by force.
Hong Kong's importance grew further after China's economic reforms and the late 20th century 'Go Out' policy. In an era when Beijing was hungry for capital and technology from advanced economies, Hong Kong's status as an international financial hub with deep Western connections made it central to China's development strategy.
But as China's economy expanded rapidly, so did its ambitions. As the world's second-largest economy, Beijing no longer views connecting with Western markets by following their rules as a strategic priority. Instead, it seeks increasingly to make its own rules on the world stage, particularly by advancing its influence among the Global South.
In the past decade, China has positioned itself as a leader of the Global South. It frequently criticizes the Western-dominated international order as unresponsive to the needs of developing countries. As it keeps trading with the West, China has ramped up engagement with the Global South through a suite of initiatives. The flagship is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which funnels Chinese capital, industrial capacity, and technology into developing countries via loans, investments, and infrastructure projects.
As Beijing's priorities expanded southward, Hong Kong's role has been realigned accordingly. The city still bridges East and West, but it has vitalized its profile in the Global South, especially among BRI partners. Hong Kong's 2016 Policy Address openly hitched the city to the Belt and Road, touting its potential to support BRI countries in a wide range of sectors. To encourage this repositioning, a 2019 Chinese State Council strategic document explicitly labeled Hong Kong a 'pivot' for the BRI's development.
This shift is more than symbolic. Recognizing Hong Kong's strength in the professional sector, Beijing has since the late 2010s sought to retool the city's economy to advance national strategic goals. State media, in a commentary later posted on the central government's website, declared that Hong Kong 'shall gradually evolve from its current role as a 'super-connector' into a 'super value-adder.'' The message was clear: Hong Kong should transition from merely facilitating deals into providing high-end services that directly support China's global agenda.
This strategy is most apparent in the international legal arena. In 2016, Beijing's 13th Five-Year Plan set a goal to turn Hong Kong into an 'international legal and dispute resolution services center in the Asia-Pacific.' Similar blueprints followed to leverage Hong Kong in shaping international standards across various fields. The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area Outline Development Plan, for instance, designated Hong Kong as both a 'regional intellectual property trading center' and a platform for international maritime legal service.
In response, the Hong Kong government rolled out a flurry of initiatives to strengthen its profile as an international legal hub, especially for BRI countries. It established the International Dispute Resolution and Risk Management Institute to offer legal and risk-management services for BRI jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong International Legal Talents Training Academy bills itself as a 'capacity-building and experience-sharing platform' for legal professionals from BRI countries, aiming to support China's 'external legal construction.' Subsequently, hundreds of international disputes involving BRI countries have reportedly been resolved in Hong Kong over the past decade.
Accelerating Realignment
Hong Kong's pivot toward the Global South, already underway in the 2010s, has gathered pace in recent years. Beijing's 2020 crackdown on the city, coupled with intensifying geopolitical tensions with the West, added urgency to China's push for what it called 'South–South cooperation.' In step with this shift, Hong Kong's leaders have grown more zealous in refocusing the city's international outreach.
Chief Executive John Lee, who took office in 2022, has embarked on high-profile tours of the Global South. In 2023, he visited several ASEAN countries, including high-level talks in Jakarta. In 2024, he appeared at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, where Hong Kong inked a memorandum of understanding to launch a $1 billion co-investment fund with Middle Eastern partners.
Financial Secretary Paul Chan, has likewise flagged the Middle East and Southeast Asia as priority markets. The city's investment promotion agency soon dispatched a high-level mission to the Gulf to attract capital. And in a telling gesture of this new focus, Hong Kong's latest Policy Address even urged local taxi operators to offer service information in Arabic.
Notably, this reorientation isn't one-sided; many Global South partners have welcomed it. Gulf states, for example, are actively expanding their economic footprint in Asia. With China now the Gulf's largest trading partner, Hong Kong has been identified as a 'key re-export hub' linking the Gulf to East Asia, a connection that fueled a nearly 150 percent annual surge in trade volumes between Hong Kong and the Gulf region.
An International City Reimagined
It would be an overstatement to claim that Hong Kong is 'decoupling' from the West. The city is still a key magnet for Western investment in Asia and remains institutionally and legally distinct from China in many ways. Yet that distinctiveness should not be misread as a sign that the city can somehow claw back its lost political autonomy.
In the past, while Hong Kong was primarily a conduit bridging East and West, the international city was designated to be autonomous to balance the interests of different powers. This also explains how it could largely remain politically neutral and focus only on business during the last Cold War. However, as Hong Kong is now repositioned to serve China's engagement with its junior partners in the Global South, the balancing position is no longer treasured. This is exemplified by the increasingly unfriendly attitudes and security measures taken by Beijing and the Hong Kong government against Western influence in the city.
Conventional wisdom holds that Hong Kong's global clout stems from its autonomy and rule of law, and that if these erode, the city's international standing will sink, hurting Beijing in turn. That logic still holds in theory. In practice, however, as Hong Kong tilts toward the Global South, its value will increasingly depend on whether China's developing-world partners – and particularly their self-perceived leader – continue to recognize what makes Hong Kong special.
Already, Western governments have stripped Hong Kong of many special treatments in protest against Beijing's actions, while much of the Global South has effectively done the opposite by carrying on with business as usual. This divergence is clear in their responses to Beijing's Hong Kong crackdown. Partly, it reflects differing ideologies and interests; but more importantly, it highlights the success of China's outreach in winning the developing countries' support.
One should be cautious not to overstate the alignment between China and its Global South partners. Yet as long as Beijing can secure support, or at least neutrality, from the developing countries regarding its official narrative of the 'successful story' in Hong Kong, Beijing appears confident in retaining the city's unique value.
Conclusion
Hong Kong, long famed as the world's bridge between East and West, is now being fundamentally redefined. The launch of IOMed demonstrates that China is reshaping the city on Beijing's own terms. So long as China aspires to global relevance, it will need Hong Kong to function as a cosmopolitan hub with political, legal, and economic distinctiveness. In that sense, Hong Kong remains – and will remain – a distinguishable international city, just one now endowed with Chinese characteristics.
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