Collaboration among the universities in the 11-city cluster will kick-start the region's technological capacity and potential, experts predict. Zhou Mo reports from Shenzhen.

Since its reunification with the motherland 24 years ago, Hong Kong has been a success story on the back of the country's stellar economic growth, with collaboration between the Chinese mainland and the special administrative region being carried out in multiple fields.

As the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), which gives Hong Kong a greater role to play in the country's next stage of development, unfolds this year, the SAR will embrace an even brighter and promising future. Enhanced cross-border cooperation is expected in a wider range of fields, including finance, technology, culture, medical care and education, under the grand Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area plan.

Higher education is one of the fields that is grabbing increasing attention. Universities and colleges are the cradle of nurturing the high-caliber talent who could determine the future of the Greater Bay Area. Cooperation on higher education between the mainland and Hong Kong is gaining steam — mainly manifested by the mounting wave of Hong Kong and Macao universities setting up campuses or branches in Guangdong province.

Experts and scholars believe the Greater Bay Area has reached a development stage at which scientific innovation plays a key role in driving its new round of growth. Integrated development between Guangdong and Hong Kong universities could leverage their respective strengths and unleash the region's technological and innovation capacity to the fullest extent, fueling high-quality development in the region, they say.

Since the launch of the Greater Bay Area development blueprint in February 2019, which made clear support for Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao to work together on running universities, cross-border cooperation in the area has sped up.

Over the past two years, at least eight projects have been set up or are in the pipeline, including The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, The University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen, City University of Hong Kong in Dongguan, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Foshan, Macau University of Science and Technology in Zhuhai, and The Open University of Hong Kong in Zhaoqing.

The development guideline for higher education cooperation in the Greater Bay Area, jointly issued by the Ministry of Education and Guangdong provincial government in December, projected a clearer vision of what the sector would be like in coming years.

According to the guideline, a batch of world-class universities will be built in the Greater Bay Area by 2035. A number of original scientific achievements that can have significant impact on the world's technological development and the progress of human civilization will be created by then. With those developments, the 11-city cluster will become a role model for the world's cooperative and innovative development of higher education, the guideline stated.