The Chinese idiom, shuang xi lin men, loosely translated as “double happiness knocks at the door”, can describe precisely what happened to Hong Kong in September, as the city has featured prominently in two separate global rankings released within little more than a week.

On Sept 8, the World Intellectual Property Organization published its 2026 ranking of the world’s top 100 innovation clusters, as part of the Global Innovation Index (GII). The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster retained the top position globally.

On Sept 16, Z/Yen Group from the United Kingdom and the China Development Institute from Shenzhen published the 40th edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), confirming that Hong Kong had retained its position as the world’s third-ranked financial hub, and Asia’s top one, for a fourth consecutive edition of the report.

Hong Kong is no longer just a financial center but a place where financial depth and innovation capacity reinforce one another.

Focusing first on the GII cluster ranking, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster’s journey to the top has not been sudden. After ranking second globally for five consecutive years, it overtook Tokyo-Yokohama for the first time in 2025. This year’s result confirms that the 2025 breakthrough was not a one-off. Over the most recent five-year period and measured on a per-million-inhabitant basis, the cluster generated 2,259 Patent Cooperation Treaty applications, 4,060 scientific articles and 138 venture capital deals, figures that place it well ahead of long-established rivals outside China.

In fact, China as a whole continues to lead all economies in terms of the sheer number of clusters featured in the GII’s top 100, with 25 this year, the largest for the fourth consecutive year, including Beijing in fourth place and Shanghai-Suzhou in sixth. This is a reminder that the strength of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster does not exist in isolation, but is part of a much broader, deepening ecosystem of innovation across the country.

For Hong Kong specifically, this is no longer just an abstract statistic. The Hong Kong Park of the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone has already attracted more than 100 technology enterprises and institutions since it opened in December. Meanwhile, the San Tin Technopole Co Ltd, which was established in June, will develop 210 hectares (2.1 square kilometers) of innovation and technology (I&T) land within the Northern Metropolis, one of the most ambitious long-term projects in the city’s history.

Both developments illustrate how the region’s innovation ambitions are being translated into physical infrastructure and institutional capacity. The SAR government said it will align this momentum with the national 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) to strengthen Hong Kong’s positioning as an international I&T center, while deepening collaboration with sister cities across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The second piece of good news came barely a week later. In the GFCI 40 Report, Hong Kong’s overall rating stood at 756, a mere point behind second-placed London (757), and a single point ahead of fourth-placed Singapore (755), with New York retaining the top spot. Few numbers illustrate the intensity of competition among the world’s leading financial centers as vividly as this one-point margin separating three of the top four cities. What makes Hong Kong’s performance even more notable is the context in which it was achieved: Many leading centers saw their ratings slip slightly this time around, amid rising geopolitical headwinds, yet Hong Kong held its ground and, in several respects, strengthened it.

These rankings arrive against a backdrop of tangible market activity that reinforces the numbers. Hong Kong’s IPO fundraising surged 153 percent year-on-year in the first eight months of 2026, propelling the local exchange back toward the top of global league tables. Combined with the city’s continued dominance in asset and wealth management, and its role as one of the world’s largest hubs for offshore renminbi business, this is further evidence that Hong Kong’s financial engine is running at full strength.

Hong Kong is not choosing between being a financial center and an innovation hub, nor between global connectivity and Chinese mainland integration. It is combining all these strengths simultaneously, and it is precisely this combination, rather than any single achievement, that constitutes the city’s real competitive advantage today.

This dual strength is a direct consequence of Hong Kong’s unique role as a superconnector between the mainland and the rest of the world. The city’s deepening integration with the Greater Bay Area allows it to draw on Shenzhen’s manufacturing and technology depth, Guangzhou’s industrial base, and its own strengths in capital markets, legal certainty and international connectivity. This synergy between finance and innovation now sits at the heart of Hong Kong’s long-term strategy, alongside the continued internationalization of renminbi and the expansion of green and sustainable finance.

Talent is the thread that ties the two rankings together most tightly. A financial center cannot climb the GFCI without deep pools of skilled professionals, and an innovation cluster cannot generate patents, papers and venture deals without researchers and engineers to produce them.

September’s double dose of good news for Hong Kong is not a coincidence but the natural result of years of deliberate, patient effort to build the city into a financial powerhouse and an innovation powerhouse. This is not a matter of luck but the reward of a long-term strategy finally paying off.

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.