There is an old Chinese saying that when everyone adds firewood, the flames rise higher. It captures well what the Macao Special Administrative Region government set in motion this week: a one-month public consultation for the 2027 Policy Address to be delivered by Chief Executive Sam Hou-fai in November.
On its own, that is a familiar administrative step, the kind that precedes almost every Policy Address in the Macao and Hong Kong SARs. What makes this particular round more interesting is its timing. A week earlier, the Macao SAR government officially released its Third Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2026-30), outlining 35 quantified development indicators covering everything from GDP growth and unemployment to public-housing supply and the expansion of Macao-invested industries within the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin. Sam framed the document around four visions, a “law-based”, “vibrant”, “cultural” and “blissful” Macao, that read as slogans on their own but are backed, unusually, by named indicators.
The consultation is not about setting Macao’s direction. That has just been published, in detail. It is about turning a published, numbered plan into one year of concrete government action.
Sam said recently that the Policy Address will rest on two pillars: strengthening residents’ well-being by enhancing business, employment, social welfare, transport and urban renewal, and building up Macao’s capacity to withstand internal and external risks, through economic diversification, deeper Macao-Hengqin integration and greater resilience, including against natural-disaster risks.
Macao formulated its first five-year plan (2016-20) in 2016 and its second in 2021 (2021-25); the latest plan published on Aug 18 is aligned with the nation’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) and drafted after a 40-day public consultation that drew more than 1,700 submissions.
Hong Kong is drafting its inaugural five-year plan. Macao is, in effect, three cycles ahead of Hong Kong on the same basic architecture. The two SARs are also sequencing that architecture differently, and the difference matters. Hong Kong is compressing its five-year plan and 2026 Policy Address into near-simultaneous release this September, a genuinely difficult drafting exercise given how many initiatives, the Northern Metropolis, artificial intelligence and robotics, talent policy, need to be fitted together for the first time in one document. Macao has staggered the two: The numbered, five-year framework is already locked in, and the 2027 Policy Address now has a dedicated three-month window to translate its priorities into specific initiatives and budget lines.
The substance the Policy Address needs to draw on is now public, and reasonably concrete. The Third Five-Year Plan focuses on Macao’s “1+4” economic diversification strategy, which designates tourism and leisure as the core pillar alongside big health, modern finance, high technology, and MICE as new growth engines, operationalizing it with a specific target of raising nongaming sectors to around 60 percent of Macao’s GDP by 2030. On tourism, the plan goes further than I expected, detailing niche products such as pet-friendly tourism, low-altitude-economy experiences and destination weddings, alongside a push to develop markets in more Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries, Europe and North America, a direction that fits naturally with the outward-facing role I described after Sam’s European visit in July.
The Hengqin chapter is where the plan gets most specific, and where the November Policy Address has the clearest opportunity to show near-term progress. The blueprint commits to white lists and joint regulatory platforms to ease the flow of cross-border research materials and equipment, to align social security so residents can access adequate services regardless of which Hong Kong-Guangdong-Macao Greater Bay Area city they live in, and to expanding medical-insurance subsidies for Macao residents living in Guangdong. It also references the Guangzhou-Zhuhai (Macao) high-speed rail link and the University of Macau’s Hengqin campus, due to begin trial operations in 2028. Each of these has a natural year-two milestone; the Policy Address consultation is the moment for residents and business associations to say which ones they expect to see move first.
There is a useful parallel here with what I described in Hong Kong’s own plan as the role of the Northern Metropolis: a physical project meant to do more than add housing or laboratory space, by acting as the hinge connecting an SAR to the Greater Bay Area’s wider innovation and manufacturing base. Hengqin plays much the same structural role for Macao, and the fact that its integration chapter carries the most concrete, dated commitments in the entire Third Five-Year Plan suggests Macao’s government understands that connector role needs to be built first, before the diversification targets riding on it can be credible.
High technology remains the pillar with the furthest to travel, and here the plan leans on government-guided funds to mobilize resources toward integrated circuits, digital technology and biomedicine, building on Macao’s four State-key laboratories in traditional Chinese medicine, microelectronics, smart-city internet of things, and lunar and planetary science. But funding and laboratories are necessary but not sufficient; the talent has to be there to use them. Hong Kong’s leap to fourth place globally, and first in Asia, in the IMD World Talent Ranking 2025 only matters because its plan is explicit about channeling that talent toward specific sectors. Macao’s Third Five-Year Plan sets the research infrastructure; its November Policy Address, and the ones that follow in this five-year cycle, will need to be equally explicit about the talent pipeline, particularly the cross-boundary movement of researchers between Macao and Hengqin, if the laboratories are to produce more than papers.
To sum up, none of this means Macao and Hong Kong are converging on identical plans; their economic structures remain genuinely different, and that complementarity is what makes the two SARs valuable to each other within the Greater Bay Area. But both are now living through the same underlying moment in Chinese governance, an era in which grand strategy is measured not in slogans but in indicators, dates and delivered kilometers of rail line.

The author is a fintech adviser, a researcher and a former business analyst for a Hong Kong publicly listed company.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.