Transcript of remarks by CE at media session
26.11.2021

Following is the transcript of remarks by the Chief Executive, Mrs Carrie Lam, at a media session after attending A New Journey with Greater Opportunities - Virtual Tour to the Greater Bay Area for Foreign Businesses in Hong Kong this morning (November 26): Reporter: Hello, Chief Executive. Can you brief us in English what's the newest progress in cross-border communication concerning the meeting held in Shenzhen yesterday? And the second question is, with the Mainland Olympic medallists coming to Hong Kong next Wednesday, which one do you particularly want to meet with and which sports do you want to play with them? Thank you, two questions. Chief Executive: Well, first of all, I fully appreciate that the Hong Kong community is very keen and anxious about resuming, in a gradual and orderly manner, some quarantine-free travel into the Mainland. Since Hong Kong has basically attained zero local cases for quite some time already, we have been working very closely with the Mainland authorities, and the Mainland experts, to sort of gain confidence and justify that we have the readiness to resume travel, and I'm very pleased that following the second meeting between the Hong Kong delegation and the Mainland delegation yesterday at Shenzhen we can now confirm that, according to the Mainland experts, Hong Kong now possesses the conditions for resuming travel. The resumption will have to take place in a gradual and orderly manner, so I would say that the Shenzhen meeting has reached an important milestone. The next step is for us to do the preparatory work for the travel to resume. Basically there are at least these two important aspects: One is the health code, how we could provide the health code to the people who voluntarily use this health code to gain entry into the Mainland of China. It's a technical issue and we are quite ready. The Innovation and Technology Bureau should be able to announce the details next week. The second preparatory work is, when the cross-border travel is going to resume, the exact arrangements in terms of the numbers on a daily basis, the conditions that each and every Hong Kong person has to meet in order to go into the Mainland without being subject to the 14-day quarantine and which particular border control points we will use in order to allow this sort of travel. All these are the preparatory issues that we will do as expeditiously as possible so that we are able to announce the exact date for the resumption of the travel. The Shenzhen meeting is a highly productive and constructive meeting. Now, we are extremely excited about the visit of the Olympians to Hong Kong. I have to thank the national sports administration for accepting our request to arrange the Olympians to come to Hong Kong and you have already been given a list. There are close to 30 gold medallists arriving in Hong Kong next week, covering a large number of sports. I'm not a fan of sports in the sense that I do not play sports actively, but I would love to see most of the sports, particularly table tennis, badminton, which are very popular in Hong Kong. On this occasion, because of COVID-19, there may not be a lot of opportunities and occasions for Hong Kong people to come into very close contact with our gold medallists, but the Hong Kong SAR Government will organise several large activities in order to enable them to see for themselves the wonderful sport excellence of our Mainland athletes. (Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.) Ends/Friday, November 26, 2021 Issued at HKT 13:48 NNNN